The deputy standing at the front of the car disconnected his call and shoved his phone into a holster on his belt. He seemed to listen to something in his earpiece, then walked over to stand on the other side of the car, watching the entrance to the parking lot.
Amy didn’t have to ask about Deputy Marshal Edgecombe’s condition. The silent conversation between the two men confirmed her suspicions.
Shutting her eyes against the pressure of tears, Amy did her best to swallow the pain in her throat. Deputy Elijah Edgecombe had been her main point of contact since she’d been relocated to Georgia over three years ago. He’d been the one to deliver news, both good and bad, to answer her questions, to check on her in those dark moments when she was certain she’d never be safe again. He was a good man, although she had no idea what his life outside of their occasional interactions looked like. It was certain someone out there would grieve the loss of a son or a husband or a brother.
If only her phone hadn’t been on vibrate. If only she’d answered the first—
“Amy.” Deputy Maldonado’s hand on her shoulder tightened. “You’re okay. We’re going to get you out of here.”
The other marshal spoke. “Two local detectives are pulling in to secure the scene. Deputy Kline is on his way with a team. Two local officers will escort our suspect out. I’m to follow you. We have to get moving though, before we draw a crowd.”
Amy opened her eyes, the full implications of his words bringing the truth back like a slap to her face. Her identity had been compromised. She turned to Deputy Maldonado, who pulled his hand from her shoulder and stood. “I can’t go home, can I?”
He glanced at the other deputy, then back to Amy before holding out his hand to her. His brown eyes were sad, either because of Deputy Edgecombe or because of her situation. “I’m sorry.”
The adrenaline that had been keeping Amy upright ebbed and left her entire body aching. Coupled with the weight of what was about to happen, she wasn’t sure she could move. She lifted her hand and placed it in Deputy Maldonado’s. He helped her out of the car, his support the only thing keeping her on her feet. When the other deputy handed him a bulletproof vest, she let Deputy Maldonado help her into it, the entire scene playing out from a distance.
She grabbed her bag. The other deputy rounded the car and held his hand out over the top of the door. “I’m going to need your bag along with your cell phone.”
Amy opened her mouth to argue, then closed it. She’d done this before and had awakened too many times to count in a cold sweat from nightmares that this moment had come again.
Well, this was no bad dream. This was her reality...again. Surrender everything she owned, leave her entire life behind, become someone completely different.
Silently, she passed the bag to the deputy, then drew her cell phone from her pocket and handed it over as well. All she had left of Amy Naylor—and of the real Amy Brady—were the wedding ring she wore around her neck and the antique watch on her wrist. The ring was the only thing she had left of her deceased husband and the watch was the only memento of the friendship that had landed her in this mess in the first place. If her other watch hadn’t died two days ago and she hadn’t replaced it with this one, she’d have likely been forced to leave it behind.
Amy let Deputy Maldonado lead her to his car. He opened the door and ushered her in, shutting it behind her before he turned to have a quick conversation with the other deputy, the one who was holding what was left of her life in his hands.
With a cold fury, she despised the nameless deputy and she didn’t even know him. He represented the horror she was facing. He’d taken the last of her identity away from her. Everything she was, everything that identified her hung casually from his fingertips in her gray messenger bag. The favorite pen she wished would never run dry. The keychain from a hiking trip along the southernmost part of the Appalachian Trail. Her phone with pictures of her few Georgia friends.
Her friends, who would never know what had happened to her. Her students, who would only know that Ms. Naylor never showed up for class. The entire life she’d built here was firmly erased by the taking of her messenger bag.
The bag with a photo slipped inside a torn lining, the photo she wasn’t supposed to have in the first place.
“Wait!”
Deputy Maldonado had pulled the door open but stopped before he slid in. “What?”
Amy reached across the seat and grabbed his hand, gripping tight, desperate for him to understand that she needed this one forbidden thing or she might lose her real self forever. “In the top pocket of my backpack, the lining is cut. There’s a picture...”
His expression tightened, the no already forming on his lips. She shouldn’t have mementos like that, pieces of her old life that someone could find and use against her. But she couldn’t let this one go. It was all she had left. “Please.”
He eyed her for a long moment before he shoved away from the car and walked over to the other deputy. There was a brief conversation before Sam dug through the messenger bag then returned, passing the picture to her as he shut the door and started the car. “I can’t promise they’ll let you keep it.”
“Thank you for trying.” She stared down at the photo in her hand. Two women and one man, smiling and happy, in better days when they didn’t know that the next two years would rip them entirely apart.
Deputy Maldonado shifted the car into gear and rolled out. He cast a lingering glance in the rearview, likely at the car that held Deputy Edgecombe’s remains.
Amy wasn’t the only one who was losing today. With a crushing weight in her chest, the grief returned. Deputy Edgecombe’s family was about to get a devastating visit. A team of men had lost a colleague. There was a difference in losing a temporary life and losing a permanent one. “I’m sorry.”
Deputy Maldonado’s eyes shifted to her and he eased out of the parking lot. “For what?”
“About Edgecombe. He was a good man.”
“The best.” He massaged the steering wheel for a moment, then tipped his chin toward the photo in her hand. “What’s so important about that photo that you’re willing to risk your neck to keep it?”
Amy turned her eyes to the picture and scanned the faces forever frozen in time. “I can look in the mirror any day and see my twin sister’s face looking back at me, but this is the only actual picture I have of her. And it’s the only one I have left of my husband and me together.”
His head jerked back. “There’s no mention of a husband in your file.”
“Then you haven’t seen my whole file. We were married six years ago, shortly before he deployed to Afghanistan.” Amy stared into Noah’s laughing hazel eyes. Their entire relationship had been the very definition of a whirlwind. They’d met in January, married in April and he deployed in July. On the first chilly autumn day in September, an army chaplain flanked by two other soldiers knocked on her door. From the first time they laid eyes on each other until the day he died, less than ten months had passed. “He was killed in a firefight in the Arghandab Valley.”
“I know the place well.”
Amy started to ask how, but experience with the buttoned-down deputy marshal told her he’d only change the subject without answering. While she’d seen him and spoken to him many times, little had changed between them in the months since she’d first met him. Back then, he’d ridden the edge of frustration and anger for the two days it had taken for him and his team to be certain she hadn’t compromised her new identity. Deputy Edgecombe had been the one to fill her in on exactly what