Within five minutes of leaving the hospital, she’d noticed the tail. Two men in a dark car, keeping pace behind her. She’d tried to lose them, taking a turn into the mall parking lot and quickly parking the car to dart into the building.
Where Nate had recognized her, despite the fact that it had been twelve years and she’d changed her hair color. Unable to master the art of wearing tinted contacts, she hadn’t been able to do much more to change her appearance.
She was so completely lost in her thoughts that she didn’t hear Nate return until he slammed the trunk, the noise making her startle.
He opened the passenger-side door closest to Hailey. “I have your suitcase. Can you carry Hailey?”
“Of course,” she said, pasting a smile on her face.
“I wanna walk,” Hailey said in an abrupt flash of independence.
“Okay, that’s fine,” Melissa assured her. She disconnected the lap strap, allowing Hailey to climb down from the seat onto the slush-covered parking lot. She edged around the seat to follow Hailey, disconcerted when her daughter skipped alongside Nate.
“We stayed in lotsa hotels on the way here, right, Mommy?” Hailey said, her previous sleepiness seeming to have vanished. “Do they have the kids’ channel here?”
“I’m sure they do,” Nate assured her, holding the door open for them so they could precede him into the building. “Our rooms are on the second floor,” he said, leading the way up the stairs. “We’re in 210 and 212.”
Melissa nodded, moving slowly enough to match Hailey’s small steps climbing the stairs. As they made their way down the hall, she watched the numbers outside the doors until they arrived at the correct ones. Nate didn’t hand her a key, though. He simply unlocked a door and held it open for her.
“Thanks,” she murmured, glancing around the room to locate the connecting door.
Nate set her suitcase down on the bed and then placed the key card on the dresser. “I’d appreciate it if you’d keep the connecting door between our rooms unlocked,” he said as he crossed over to it and opened it.
“I understand,” she said evasively, unwilling to make a promise she might not be able to keep.
“Movie, Mommy! Check and see if there’s a children’s movie that I can watch.”
Since Hailey didn’t look sleepy anymore, Melissa obliged by picking up the remote and flipping through the channels until she found the one Hailey wanted.
Nate left, presumably to go to his own room. A few minutes later, he opened his side of the connecting door.
“It’s time we talked,” he said in a low voice. “Hailey will be fine here, watching her show. We’ll leave the connecting doors open in case she needs something.”
Melissa wanted to protest, but of course there wasn’t a rationale for putting this discussion off any longer.
As she followed him into his room, she tried to figure out how much she could safely tell him. He needed just enough information to understand the level of danger.
Including a good reason to let her go.
Full of apprehension, she dropped into a seat next to the small round table tucked in the corner of his room. Her heart was beating too fast, and she took several deep breaths in order to bring her pulse down.
“Who were those men following you?” Nate asked, his tone soft but firm.
“I don’t know,” she answered honestly. “I’ve never seen either of them before in my life.”
Nate’s mouth thinned as if he wasn’t sure he believed her. “Okay, then why were they following you?”
“I don’t know that, either,” she said. When his face tightened in anger, she knew she’d have to tell him something. “Listen, Nate, you need to understand, all of this started a long time ago.”
He folded his arms over his chest. “I’m listening.”
She licked her suddenly dry lips. “You remember how I waitressed at the restaurant back in high school, right?”
Nate nodded. “At El Matador, which is still there, believe it or not.”
Still in Brookmont, the elite suburb of Milwaukee that she and Nate had once called home.
The thought of the upscale restaurant being there all these years later was not reassuring. Did it continue to be a meeting point for the upper echelon of Brookmont? Or had they moved their little clique somewhere different after that fateful night?
“Melissa, what happened back then? What caused you to move away and change your name?” Nate asked.
“Something terrible occurred the night after graduation,” she said.
Nate nodded slowly. “Go on,” he encouraged her.
She couldn’t for the life of her find the words to explain in a way that didn’t give away the entire truth. The silence stretched painfully long between them.
“I heard about the drugs that were found in your room,” Nate finally said. “I didn’t want to believe that you were an addict, but your father admitted that he sent you to rehab.”
She snapped her head up to stare at Nate. “You believed that?” she asked in an agonized whisper. “Even though we spent every free moment we could together, you still believed that?”
“You weren’t here to tell me otherwise,” Nate said, accusation lacing his tone. “What was I supposed to think? You disappeared and I never heard from you again, not one letter in response to all the ones I sent you.”
She blinked in surprise. “What letters?”
Nate’s gaze narrowed. “The letters I gave your father to send to you. He wouldn’t give me your address, but he agreed to send you my letters. I kept waiting and waiting to hear back from you, but I never did.”
Melissa’s entire body went numb, as if someone had dumped a bucket of ice water over her head. “I’m sorry,” she murmured. “I’m so sorry.”
“For what?” Nate challenged her. “For leaving without saying goodbye? For not even trying to get in touch with me? I commuted to college my first year because I was afraid you wouldn’t find me when you came back. But you never did.”
The anguish in Nate’s voice lashed at her like a whip. It wasn’t her fault that she’d been forced to leave, but he’d been deeply hurt by her actions nonetheless. And why hadn’t her father passed along his letters? Had her father been afraid that Nate would come after her?
Looking at Nate now, she knew that was exactly what he would have done.
“Well?” he demanded in a harsh tone.
She glanced over her shoulder at the open connecting door between their rooms. “Not so loud, or Hailey will hear.”
Nate’s jaw tightened with anger, and she knew that there was no way of getting around the fact that he needed to hear a portion of her story.
“I was working at the restaurant the night after graduation. In fact, I was scheduled to close. It was pretty busy. The place was packed, but as the hour grew later, there were only a few tables left. A group at one table in particular lingered, so I was trying to get as much of the cleanup work done as possible.” She paused, shivering at the memory of what transpired that night.
“Go on,” Nate urged.
“I cleaned out the large coffeepots in the back room, and then I hauled some garbage out to the dumpsters. Usually the dishwasher does that, but he was busy, and I was anxious to leave.”
“To