Page 55 of Love What's Left
“Consider it gone,” I say immediately.
“I don’t want to hurt you. But Markov may have tried to make me.”
“You’re strong as hell. You know that, don’t you?”
She shakes her head. “How can you say that . . . when you see me . . . like this?”
“He forced that drug on you, and instead of listening to him, you created a mantra to keep him out. You repeated it until no one else could get in your head.”
She rubs her temple. “Not even myself. I need to remember how he got to me.”
“Don’t let my brother convince you that any of this is your responsibility. You don’t need to be the one to solve this case. There are private investigators working on it.”
“I signed in to my work account. IT helped me. Amelia filled in some blanks.”
I nod. “I know.”
“Most of my records from the last three months were gone, like they never existed. That can’t be . . . normal. IT should be able to find them. Even . . . deleted . . . files.”
“We don’t use cloud storage for information we need to protect, and the hard drives, themselves, are missing or were vandalized.”
“How could that happen? Weren’t there cameras? Security?”
My poker face isn’t nearly as good as my brother’s or father’s. She clocks me immediately.
“Tell me,” she says.
“Granthy said pushing you could put you into a crisis, maybe even a coma. The headaches and flashbacks scare the shit out of me.”
Her hands ball into fists, and she sits up on her knees. “I need to know. And I have to believe it’ll be easier to handle when I’m braced for it. The doctor blindsided me. This is different, and you’re right here if I need you.”
I straighten to my full height, then lend her my hand, giving her a boost to stand. “I’ll show you, but fair warning: If anything happens to you because of it, I’m going to shout, ‘My God, what have I done?!’ in the most dramatic way possible.” I say it as though it’s a joke, but the sentiment is dead serious. “I’m still angry at Henry for sending you to the closet for three days. Emotional stress causes physical symptoms all the time. Tension headaches. High blood pressure. Heart attacks. Elevated cortisol. Changes in insulin levels. And even if it didn’t, recovering from trauma isn’t an easy thing. Symptoms aren’t less important because they originated in your ‘head’ instead of your ‘body.’”
“I don’t have a migraine right now, and I got plenty stressed out during my appointment with Dr. Frankhouser. I want to see the security files,” she insists.
Stepping around to face the computer on the desk, I indicate the chair for her to sit. When she does, I stand beside her and reluctantly wake the monitor before typing in the passcode to unlock the screen. It takes three clicks of the mouse to reach the security footage from the day she went missing. One more to locate the time stamp I need.
She watches, her knuckles blanching white where she clenches her hands in her lap. Then she reaches for the mouse and restarts the video. Soundlessly, she watches two more times.
“It was me,” she says, voice flat. “And I wore my lucky hat to do it. Like it was something to celebrate.”
“The footage doesn’t have a clear shot of your face,” I say. “And there were no cameras inside the lab or your office, only the hallways.”
“So, not me, just someone with my hair, my clothes, my height, my lucky hat, and my badge.”
She’s right. Her favorite cardigan was too baggy to see the body type beneath it, but it’s a stretch to imagine it wasn’t her. She used her own keycard to sign in. She didn’t come home to our penthouse until much later that night, and she spent the rest of the evening afterward at home. She didn’t disappear until sometime the next afternoon. “Maybe you found the desktop computers vandalized already and took a couple laptops for safekeeping.”
“That doesn’t make sense. I would have called security. Where are the laptops now?”
“We never found them. Maybe you didn’t trust building security.”
“What about my own team?”
“There was a mix-up. Dave was on vacation, and the app you used for scheduling updated Troy’s schedule to compensate, then later moved him back onto night shift. He received confirmation that you had alternate coverage, but you didn’t.” I blow out a hard breath. “You realized what happened the next day but said it didn’t matter. You’d lived twenty-eight years of your life without a bodyguard, and a couple days without one wasn’t hurting anything, so you sent Annabel home at the end of her shift and refused to allow her to call Troy in to work a double. She was following orders, but she was pretty torn up that she agreed after what happened to you.”
Rufus pads over and winds around her legs.
“Not her fault.” She picks him up and holds him close. His motor revs under her touch. “It almost sounds like I wanted my bodyguards out of the picture.”
