Tomorrow I’ll be Beth.
Tonight I’m still me.
Chapter Eight
SAUL
I keep a list.
Not official, nothing in any file. Just a notebook I’ve had since my first year as a Marshal, the pages soft now from handling.
Forty-three names. Forty-three people I’ve helped disappear into new lives, new identities, new versions of themselves that might keep them breathing a little longer.
I don’t know why I started keeping it. Maybe because the job makes it too easy to forget that these are people, not cases. Not file numbers. Not problems to be solved and moved along.
Forty-three names, and I remember something about each of them. The accountant who cried for three days straight and then asked me to teach her to shoot. The kid, barely nineteen, who kept a photo of his dog hidden in his wallet even though I told him he couldn’t. The grandmother who baked bread every morning in her new apartment because the smell reminded her of home.
I thought I’d seen every version of this. Every way a person falls apart when you take away everything that made them who they were.
But I’ve never met anyone like Stevie Reeves.
It’s 2 AM and I’m lying in a hotel room that smells like industrial cleaner and other people’s choices, staring at a ceiling I couldn’t describe if you paid me, and all I can think about is the way she looked when I left her in that apartment.
Not crying. That might have been easier.
Just standing there, arms wrapped around herself, looking at me like I was the last real thing she’d ever see.
I’ve been doing this job for eight years. I know how to leave. Know how to close the door and drive away and not look back, because looking back doesn’t help anyone.
You do what you can, you set them up as best you can, and then you let them build whatever life they’re going to build without you.
That’s the job. That’s how it works.
But something about leaving her there felt like abandoning a small animal in a cardboard box on the side of the road.
I roll over. Punch the pillow into a different shape. Close my eyes and see her face anyway.
She noticed everything during intake. That’s what keeps snagging in my head.
Most witnesses are so deep in shock they can barely sign their own names. They sit where you put them, answer what you ask them, stare at walls like the walls might have answers.
Stevie noticed the agents. I could see her cataloging them, filing away details about men specifically trained to be forgettable. She noticed the room.
She noticed me.
The way she looked at me when I walked in, those dark eyes tracking across my face like she was memorizing me for later. Like I was something worth remembering.
I’m not used to being seen like that.
My ex-wife used to say I was impossible to know. That I kept myself at a distance even when I was standing right next to her.
She wasn’t wrong. There’s something in me that’s better at taking care of strangers than people who actually love me. Easier to show up for someone who doesn’t expect anything beyond the job description.
Stevie doesn’t expect anything from me. She made that clear when she thanked me for staying during her haircut, like basic human decency was some kind of gift.
It shouldn’t have affected me.
It did anyway.
