1
Twenty-two months later
Tack
“I think we found her.”
The words gave me false hope. I’d heard them before. Branson Marx was the best private investigator in the business, and yet, he’d failed once before.
“Are you certain this time?” I gruffly asked.
“Tack,” he warned, looking up at me over his studious glasses. His light-colored hair stood on end, as if he’d been running his fingers through it. Bright eyes narrowed on mine. “I gave you my word.”
I shook my head, staring out the second story window. Branson’s office looked like the stereotypical made-for-movies P.I. office—a mess. It was a wonder he could find anything in his office, let alone a human being outside of it. The human being in this instance was a beautiful creature who had disappeared from my life nearly two years ago. Her violet eyes danced in my head. Her breathless gasps as I entered her for the first time haunted my ears. The way she moved under my body appeared in my dreams nightly. There were moments I thought I felt her and then she was gone.
“I know. It’s just…sometimes…” Sometimes I still thought she was a product of my desperately lonely and guilty mind. A figment of my imagination. Colton Edwin told me as much.
You want to believe she was real, and so she was. But only to you.
He didn’t understand. Juliet Montmore had been very real to me. That one night when I decided initiation into a sex club was more important than the emotions of a woman. I’d sunk to the lowest depths I could go because I thought she wanted it that way. The way Rick had told me the women in his club wanted it. The way Rick said she wanted it. The way I thought I wanted it to be, until I saw her.
Frightened, closed off, used. My stomach rolled with the memory.
I went to the island to be redeemed for what I’d done. Little did I know how that redemption would play out. She would be my forgiveness and then she became my reason for breathing.
Colton had it wrong, because I experienced Juliet Montmore more than once, and I learned who she was. Is, I corrected. She hadn’t died. She disappeared. She still exists; just out there in the world, but unfortunately, not in mine.
Branson knew all this. My history with the island and with her—the good, the bad, and everything in between—had to be explained in order for him to understand. I had to find her. There weren’t many people I trusted but I trusted him. No one else had believed me. Garvey Edwin, my restoration coach, thought I had some sort of vision quest. As the restorative justice process was based in the Native American culture, he thought I saw her as a way to seek healing. Colton, his son, stepped closer to the truth, knowing I wanted to believe in her reality, but his own experience taught him she wasn’t real. She was a figment of my mind, conjured to find forgiveness within myself. Colton’s girl was gone forever; mine was not. My girl still walks this earth, not my imagination.
“I get it. She’s important to you,” Branson said, interrupting my thoughts. “I understand.” He did understand. He’d witnessed many times when good people made bad decisions. It had happened to him.
“Look, I just can’t handle false hope. It’s been almost two years.” I sighed. It had been 21 months and 17 days. When you spent a portion of your life counting them, you began to realize how valuable those days could be. I thought we had more time. In fact, the banishment was scheduled for a full year. We’d only made it 69 days. Ironic number. It was one of the things I hadn’t done yet with her. One of the multitude of ways I planned to experience her. Once we found her.
“Looks like a Juliet Monte published a dissertation titled My Time on the Island. She got a doctorate degree in West Virginia.”
“Shit,” I said, shifting to lean forward in my chair opposite Branson’s desk. We’d looked everywhere up and down the Atlantic coastline, but I told him to concentrate on Baltimore. That’s where I met her, if you could call our first encounter a meeting. The Front Door had been the place of that fateful night. I had no other information beyond that she had spent some years in a trailer park in Alabama. I was confident she hadn’t returned.
“Looks like the dissertation came from Weston, a small university up in the mountains.” I recalled her saying she attended a university near Baltimore, but Juliet Montmore had not returned there after her time on the island.
“What’s the dissertation about?”
“The subtitle says ‘a dissertation in self-reflection through visualization and solitary confinement—a restoration of the criminal.’” Branson grimaced. “Sounds intense.”
“Why do you think it’s her? It sounds like she changed her name.”
“Most people change their name so they can’t be found. Hiding from family. Hiding from the past.” He paused and removed his glasses. His large arms crossed on his desk. “I’m not saying she was doing that from you.”
“But she might have,” I added, swiping my hand through my hair. Fuck. “What about the rest?”
“I think a dissertation on solitary confinement on an island visualizing someone might be our best clue that it’s her.” He smirked, and if I didn’t like Branson as a person, I’d want to punch the smug look off his hard face.
“So take me to her,” I said, shifting to the edge of my seat.
“It doesn’t quite work that way. Let me dig a little deeper to be certain. I just wanted to let you know I had the best lead I’ve had in months.”
Branson felt guilty about the last lead. A girl who fit Juliet’s description had been spotted near The Front Door, that fateful club, eight months ago. When I heard she may have been there, perhaps had even gone back inside, I’d bought the bar for an exorbitant price and burned it to the ground. I didn’t want her anywhere near The Front Door. Curious mouse or not, she didn’t need that club. I’d worried over time that she needed money. She didn’t have many things, but that club was no longer an answer for her. I was.
The result of that investigation lost the trail of the girl.
But not this time. This time I had a feeling Branson was onto something. My heart leapt in my chest in a way it hadn’t in a long time. She might have been avoiding me, but I was determined to find her. A lion on the hunt, persistently pursuing an ever-evading mouse, I would catch my prey.
Gotcha, Mouse.