But Nina couldn’t help feeling like maybe she’d been left behind.
Wyatt returned her smile. “And...now you’re trying to find this Mr. Thomas guy? To prove that your father is innocent and get him out of prison?”
“My father is dead.”
* * *
Wyatt swallowed against the lump in his throat. “I see.”
An innocent man had died in prison? There wasn’t much that Nina would achieve by unearthing something everyone else involved probably considered over and done with. He didn’t like it, but things were what they were. Still, the look on her face pricked his heart.
“I could...make some calls.” He took a breath. “Find the original investigating FBI agent, see if I can maybe get you a copy of the file.”
If she saw the evidence against her father for herself then she would know why he’d been put away. Maybe after that she could be convinced she didn’t need to continue on this fruitless search. Wyatt wasn’t discounting her memories, but she had been a child. Whether her mother had been having an affair or not, her father had been convicted for a reason. The evidence had to have been conclusive, or there would never have been a guilty verdict.
He believed in the justice system, despite its flaws. Wyatt believed if the evidence hadn’t been there, then the wrong person would not have been sent to prison.
“You would do that?” Nina’s look was full of hope, of wonder, that he might be able to help her. “Could you get the file?”
Wyatt nodded. “It’s worth a try.” He had a cousin who was an FBI agent that he could ask. If only to put to rest her questions, and this search she was on, to find a truth that was likely anything but. It’d be worth a call to help her do what he’d had to.
Move on.
Have you, really?
“Thank you.” She jumped up and put her arms around him.
Wyatt was taken aback for a moment, but remembered himself fast enough that he could return the hug before she got embarrassed over what she’d done. When was the last time someone had hugged him to say thank you? He wasn’t sure he could remember.
When they’d eaten, he set the dirty dishes in the sink and wiped his hands on a towel. “I should head back to the office, but I’ll make some calls this afternoon.”
Nina looked up at him from her perch on the stool. Her big blue eyes were full of sadness, and possibilities. It was enough to convince him she was onto something, despite the evidence to the contrary. Her need to prove that things had been the way she remembered them was strong, he got that. He understood why someone would want to preserve their memory of what had been—to prove what she knew to be true. But she was talking about events that happened when she was a young child, and since then she could easily have distorted things in her head.
Children were notoriously bad witnesses when any time had passed. Often they only wanted to tell adults what they wanted to hear—or what they themselves wanted to believe had happened. Was that the case here?
“Thank you, Wyatt.”
He nodded. The wall he could see in the living room caught his eye, so he trailed toward it. Nina jumped up and intercepted him. “Didn’t you just say you had to get back to work?”
Wyatt looked at her.
“There’s nothing interesting in there.”
Except that he thought there were printed pages or even newspaper articles tacked to the portion of the wall he could see. Why didn’t she want him to go in there and look? Nina wasn’t exactly hiding what she was doing. Parker and Sienna obviously knew about her looking into her mother’s murder, and she’d told him without too many qualms.
“If you say so.” But he didn’t believe her.
If she’d tacked pictures and news releases on the wall in her living room, this was clearly worse than he’d thought. It had consumed her daytime hours, which meant it also consumed her nights, too. Parker seemed to think she had to be reminded to eat. The signs were all there.
Nina was obsessed.
He understood why well enough. He’d been there himself even, but he knew what the end would be. If Nina kept going, either she would destroy herself trying to find the answers, or she would reach the end and find not even an ounce of the satisfaction she’d been looking for. She was going to wind up empty and exhausted with no answers.
“I guess I’ll be going then.” He stepped back. “Have a nice rest of your day.”
Wyatt walked to the door. That hadn’t been a great thing to say. Nina didn’t need the brush-off. What she needed was someone who could be compassionate to her situation—and that just wasn’t Wyatt. Sympathy, yes. But he didn’t know how much more he could give her when it would probably be unhelpful.
He turned back to her. “Be careful, and let me know if you need anything.”
But it couldn’t be denied she also needed someone who was going to tell her the truth—her father likely was her mother’s murderer. That the man she thought had done it didn’t have any reason to have killed her mom, not if they were in a relationship. She’d said herself that they had been happy, her mother and this “Mr. Thomas.”
“Goodbye, Wyatt.” Her voice was small, damaged. She didn’t sound anything like the self-assured former CIA agent he’d come to know.
A woman who had nearly died today.
Wyatt pulled out his phone before he hit the elevator. It rang twice and Sergeant Zane answered. “Hey, I need a favor.”
He felt better after he’d ordered regular drive-bys of her building to check for suspicious activity that could be another attack. There wasn’t much else he could do aside from 24-7 protection, but Wyatt still drove away racking his brain for other things that might help. Whoever had tried to kill her with that car would most likely try again.
And Wyatt was going to be there when he did.
The click of the front door echoed through the foyer. Nina’s socks whispered on the floor as she trailed to the living room. The walls were covered with sketches she’d done from memory after she’d learned how to properly execute a suspect drawing, but weren’t useful at all in identifying Mr. Thomas. Articles she’d printed from archived newspapers detailed her mother’s murder all the way through the investigation to the sentencing...and then finally her father’s death in prison.
It was a play-by-play of the worst days of Nina’s life.
She kept them up as a reminder and as a memorial. She couldn’t let anyone in, not without knowing their true motives. Nor was she prepared to open herself up—except to people like Sienna who convinced her otherwise. Not when there were people in the world who would slit a woman’s throat even knowing the woman’s child was on her way home.
Nina turned a full circle to look at the sum of her life now. Her search for the truth would enable her to move on, and the teaching job would begin the next chapter of her life. She just had to find Mr. Thomas before fall semester started.
The floor creaked.
She spun again, half expecting Wyatt to have come back for some forgotten thing. It wasn’t him.
Mr. Thomas stepped into the room.
He wore a suit,