Aria paced the hallway for a few moments before she decided to tap on his door. Monroe had actually protected her by yelling at her. It was a smart, strategic move. Yet for some reason, the boom in his voice and the way he’d dismissed her whole existence was lingering over her like a dark cloud. Monroe slipped so easily into the type of people who’d wielded power over her and the other employees at the resort. How quickly he could sound like a demanding, never satisfied monster.

“There you are,” Monroe said, looking instantly relieved as he snatched up her hand and pulled her into the room. Closing the door quickly, Monroe looked at her from head to toe. “How bad did it go after I left?”

“Just some demerits and a stern talking to,” she said, dismissing his worry with a wave of her hand. “Nothing I can’t handle. It was a smart move on your part. Certainly put her off the trail. Have you had a chance to look at the documents?”

He poured her a glass of rich red wine and handed it over with a look of apology. “I was just thinking about that. You risked a lot to go up there.”

“I told you, I couldn’t sit around and wait for you.” Her face flushed as his stare grew more intense.

“Even if patience wasn’t your strength, it wouldn’t make much sense for you to put yourself in the line of fire like that. So I started thinking about why you went up. And you know what I realized?” Monroe had a tiny mischievous smile on his face.

“What?”

“You wanted to make sure I didn’t come across your file. Very smart. I should have known you had a hidden agenda.”

“That’s not it at all,” she lied, taking a large swig of her wine and hoping when she was finished he wouldn’t still be staring at her.

“I won’t underestimate you in the future. What exactly would I have found in your file? Why are you here?” His wide shoulders and expanded chest were enough to have her pulsing with desire, but circumstances killed that quickly. These were the questions she could do without.

“Why does it matter?” she asked, propping a hand up on her hip and trying to look like she couldn’t be rattled.

“Because somewhere in that story is the reason you think you can’t leave. Somewhere in that truth is the objection I need to overrule. Until I know what is going on in your head I can’t convince you of your options.” He sat in the large leather chair in the corner and ran a hand through his hair. “So what do I need to do for you to tell me the truth?”

“Why do you care where I go or don’t go?” She gulped back the nerves brewing and kept her chin tipped back proudly. “I’m a grown woman. I don’t need a knight in shining armor to rescue me.”

“Fine.” Monroe sighed. “But I still want to know. I’m a stubborn bastard, and I’ll keep finding new ways to try to find out. I’ll start by being a real pain in the ass.”

“Start?” she asked playfully.

“I’m not going to let up,” he promised. “I always get what I want.”

“Fine,” she huffed, flopping down on the couch across from him. “But you’ll need to top this glass off.”

“You’ve hardly had a sip,” he countered as she raised it to her lips and chugged the wine down.

“I see you have many hidden talents.” Monroe laughed as he stood, grabbed the bottle of wine, and obliged her request. “Now start talking.”

She nibbled at the inside of her cheek as she considered telling the story she’d been holding secret for over six years. She hadn’t been practicing the narrative. She’d been pretending it had never happened. She opened her mouth, hoping the story would take shape, instead a jumble of thoughts poured out.

“I was abducted . . . well, by my mother. My mother took me when I was three. I didn’t know that, obviously, because I was three.” She took a slow sip of her wine as she tried to gather herself.

“I better have a glass myself,” Monroe said somberly. “Sounds like this isn’t going to be quite what I expected.”

“Tell me what you thought brought me here,” Aria pleaded, wondering what she looked like through the prism of his eyes.

“Honestly,” he said, filling his glass and settling back into his leather chair, “I expected you to tell me you had some boyfriend back home who’d gotten you mixed up in something. Or maybe some jerk treated you bad, and you thought you needed to hide out. That was a problem I was looking forward to solving for you. Bashing the heads of shitty ex-boyfriends is a favorite hobby of mine.”

“There are a few girls here that are in that predicament, if that grabs your attention. I’m sure you can slay all their dragons, and they’ll love you forever. I’m sorry to disappoint you. My reasons are a little more complicated.” She glanced out the window and watched the clouds gathering together.

“My hero complex is well in check,” Monroe assured her. “I don’t care about any other women here. I care about you. Now tell me how someone can be abducted by their own mother. You’re her child. You’re hers to take.”

“I was also my father’s child,” she corrected. “They were going through a very difficult divorce, and he went to work one day and we left. Just like that. She changed our names. We got fake papers. I have no real memory of my father or my life in Philadelphia. We settled in Texas, and I spent my entire childhood having no idea I was on a list of missing children.”

“That is complicated. But how do you get from there to here?” Monroe asked, clearly unable to piece together how a childhood like that meant she had to stay here.

“For as far back as I can remember I asked my mother who my father was. Where he was. She didn’t even have the decency to make up some story. She could have said he died in the military. Or he ran off with another woman and wanted nothing to do with us. All she did was tell me not to ask. She was adamant that I didn’t ask. Move on. For a while I swallowed that but then it wasn’t enough. I pestered her.”

“That doesn’t seem like an unreasonable expectation for a curious kid,” Monroe agreed. “So you kept asking?”

“No, eventually, when I realized she’d never tell me, I stopped asking and started looking. I realized there were no photographs of us before I was three years old. She never told me exactly where I was born, but occasionally she’d say up north or talk about snow. I had very little to go on. So when I started my search I was using all the wrong information.”

“But eventually you found him?” Monroe looked thoroughly intrigued. Aria couldn’t tell if this was entertaining to him or if he truly cared. After all, who didn’t like a good mystery?

“I tried to find him. It was over two years of me playing detective and piecing it all together. Eventually I would’ve given it up. That was right when social media started becoming more prevalent. I saw this post about two brothers who were taken from their mother by their father, and they’d recently found out. There was this montage of their reunion with their mother all smiles, hugs, and tears. It was just a spark of an idea, but it made me realize there was a chance my father was looking for me. At the end of their video was a link to the national website for missing children. I typed in the little bit of information I had and got thousands of files. No real way to narrow it down any further.”

“But you didn’t give up,” Monroe said, beaming like it was his victory. “You never seem to give up.”

“I looked through every single file,” Aria said, getting lost in the memory of her eyes straining and her fingers cramping. “I’d put almost all of my life on hold in order to mine the website for any sign of myself. But it never came. I never saw a little baby who had my eyes. No child listed with a birthmark on her left shoulder. I did, however, read some of the saddest heart-wrenching stories imaginable of families searching for children. All I could picture was my father, this faceless nameless man I can’t remember. Maybe he was looking for me. Maybe his heart was breaking.”

“Yet you found nothing?”

“I didn’t find myself on the website,” Aria explained. “I found her.”

“Your mother?” Monroe asked, leaning forward in his chair and furrowing her brows. “You found your mother on the site?”

“Yes,” Arai answered, the lightning bolts of pain still present when she remembered that awful discovery. “She was the last seen with person attached to a missing child. I pulled up the picture and there she was. Big blue eyes. A few less wrinkles. Her hair was a little longer. But otherwise exactly the same.”

“What did you do?”

“I started getting all the information I could. I found the stories my father had told on local news channels. He’d desperately pleaded for my safe return. There was even a financial reward for any information. Scott Laurence. Just a normal guy from Philly who had his child stolen away. But no one was all that interested in finding me. No one particular agency was dedicated to something like that. Plus the details were murky. Was my father really a good man, or the kind of man my mother was right to run from? It wasn’t clear.”

“Wow,” Monroe said, placing his wine down on the end table near him as though this were too exciting to bother drinking it.

“I gathered all the information like ammunition. I dug. I filed for copies of their divorce documents. Newspaper articles. Anything anyone said about my parents. I wanted to know exactly who said what leading to my mother taking me.” She rubbed at the pain in her temple that always sparked to life when the past bubbled to the surface. “There wasn’t anything concrete. Just speculation and he said/she said. Lots of allegations against each other but none substantiated.”

“Not that uncommon for a messy divorce,” Monroe interjected, and she read a hint of sadness on his face. “My parents weren’t much better when my father walked out. I can’t say I saw him very much over the years.”

“Knowing someone doesn’t want to see you by choice is different than thinking maybe they’ve been looking for you and can’t find you,” Aria pointed out aptly.

“I know,” Monroe agreed. “It’s a hell of a punch, thinking they don’t want you. But I can’t imagine knowing you couldn’t get back to him because of her.”

“I took what I had, and I went to my mother. I sat her down and laid it all out. You should have seen how smug I was.” Regret filled every corner of Aria’s chest like water poured into a glass. “I knew his name. I knew her real name. I thought I was so smart.”

“It was pretty incredible that with so little information you were able to find the truth. You were smart.”

“I was shortsighted,” she corrected, anger on her tongue, though she knew he didn’t deserve it. “I had these images in my head of this reuniting with my long-lost father. We’d be on the news. People from all over the world would send us congratulations.”

“But that didn’t happen?” Monroe questioned, dropping his head at the obvious realization.

“No. My mother was never a terribly stable person. It was obviously eluded to in the court documents, but there was never any kind of diagnosis. They said at the time of the split she’d been doing drugs, pills I think, and it could have made her paranoid enough to think my life was in danger. That instability reared its head the day I confronted her. She lost it. Completely and utterly flipped out. I’ve never seen anyone break that way. I broke her. She just fractured.”

“I’m sure she’d been holding on to the secret for so long, it would have been devastating however it came to light. You hunting it down didn’t necessary mean you were to blame. These were her choices.”

“I can’t really describe it in a way that would make you understand,” she whispered, pulling her knees up to her chest and curling up on the couch. “She reached for a knife and there was a point I wasn’t sure if she wanted to hurt me or herself. I will never forget the wild look in her eyes. She told me the simple act of requesting these documents and sticking my nose into her business was enough to ruin us both. What I failed to look into was how much trouble my mother would face when caught. There were federal charges against her. Bench warrants. She’d likely, under the circumstances, have to spend a couple decades in prison.”

“She could probably negotiate a deal of some kind if she turned herself in voluntarily,” Monroe suggested with that let’s find a solution mentality every man seemed to cling to.

“In that moment, my mother standing there with a knife in her hand, the threat of jail nipping at her heels, I didn’t consider she might make a deal. The risk, the fear, it outweighed everything. She held the knife to her wrist and told me I’d killed her. I’d ended the life she’d built. And she had a life. My mother made costumes for the school plays. She drove me to cheerleading practice. Every Wednesday she played cards with her friends. What I’d be robbing her of was a full and happy life.”

“What about what she robbed you of?” Monroe countered, completely unwilling to let Aria lay the blame at her own feet.

“Or what if she was saving me from something? That was her story. She rescued me from an abusive monster who wouldn’t have rested until I was dead.”

“And you never found out? You never tried to get that answer?” Monroe furrowed his brows and looked at her, still confused.

“I’d kicked the hornets’ nest,” Aria explained. “If they could find me through all the documents I ordered, they could find my mother. Things were changing. They’d introduced databases for fingerprints and DNA. My dad, in one of the videos pleading for information about me, said he’d turned over my hairbrush and my DNA was now on file. They’d done one of those handprints of me when I was a baby, and they had my fingerprints too. If I applied for a job at a school or for the government they’d have me. If I was arrested for anything more than a driving violation, my DNA might be added to the database, and that would be the end of our secret. It would be the end of my mother’s freedom. Maybe even her life if she was desperate enough.”

“So you left?” Monroe asked, finally seeming to understand the choice Aria had to make.

“I helped my mother pack up or sell everything we owned. I stood in our driveway and watched her back away and leave. I don’t know where she went or what she did from there. She told me if I loved her I would disappear. Take myself out of the equation.”

“That’s absurd,” Monroe said with an exasperated laugh. “She left you? Twenty years old, having found out your life was a lie, and she left you there? She expected you to be a prisoner in your own life, to keep her from facing the consequences of her own choice?”

“On paper I’m sure it seems like I had other choices. I did what I thought I had to do. I had a backpack full of my things, and I went to the airport. The problem was I couldn’t get the courage to actually go anywhere. At first I thought I’d ignore my mother’s breakdown, and I’d go confront my father. Then I thought I’d go to Europe the way I always wanted to, but I only had a few hundred dollars. I sat in the airport for two days, waiting for some kind of answer to what I should do. Then a woman approached me.”

“Someone from here?”

“She asked if I was all right, and she noticed I’d been there a while. Her name was Mandy, and she offered me some of her sandwich. I hadn’t eaten in a while since I was trying to conserve the little money I had. After we talked a while, she asked me where I was headed. I don’t even remember what I said. I kind of mumbled about going nowhere. Disappearing. Mandy was so kind. Empathetic. It was like she knew exactly what I was talking about, even though I was hardly making sense. After more time together, she told me she was taking a job at this resort, and if I didn’t have anywhere else to go she was sure she could get me a job too.”

“How convenient.” Monroe sighed angrily. “And you jumped at the opportunity?”

“Not exactly. I told her I couldn’t really start a job right then. I didn’t want to do a background check or have anything on the record. Mandy had an answer for everything. She said lots of girls who work there are in tough situations and the employer would work around that. Every time I came up with a reason I couldn’t go, Mandy gave me a solution.”

“Overruling objections,” Monroe said with a nod. “I’m guessing they’re trained well. Identify targets, understand their needs, then close the deal.”

“I was on a plane with her three hours later. Disappearing just how my mother had told me to. If anything I’d done had put someone on our trail, it would grow cold. All I had to do was build myself a new life here. I had this vision. I’d spend my days working at the resort, and I’d make all new friends. Saving up as much money as I could, I’d eventually buy my own little place here. Then maybe I’d see if it was possible to open up a little dress shop where I could make some of my own designs.”

“How long did it take you to realize what was going on?” Monroe asked, now looking somber as though he were experiencing this journey with her.

“It took a couple of days for it to sink in. Mandy was nowhere to be found. Probably off at some other airport looking for more people to recruit. I thought maybe the living arrangements in the bunks would be temporary but obviously not. For a while I stayed focused on working hard to earn enough to change things. It became clear that wouldn’t happen either. I’m stuck, and I’ve come to terms with that.”

“You aren’t stuck,” Monroe said firmly. Rising from his chair, he crossed the space between them assertively and sat by her on the couch. Still curled up, he wrapped an arm around her small frame. “You aren’t trapped here. There are things I can do.”

“You can’t change history. You can’t unring the bell that is my life. I might not like the circumstances, but this job gives me anonymity. It’s a bubble, and I’ve found ways to be grateful for it.”

“Enough,” he said, squeezing her tighter. “Stop all of that. No one wants to live their life hiding out and working with no hope for a future. I don’t buy that you’re at peace with this. Why would you want me to know what’s going on here?”

“Because you told me you always get what you want. I was hoping I could get you to want this place fixed. I thought maybe you’d want to get Elena back to her family.”

“You give me way too much credit,” Monroe whispered. “I’m not everybody’s hero. But if you let me, I can be yours.” He tipped her chin up and kissed her passionately, stifling the gasp as he lifted her with ease off the couch. Never breaking the kiss, he carried her to the bed. For right now, she’d believe in him. In his arms she could imagine passion would wash away reality.