But she knew, of course. Tom. Or one of his team. Mary, maybe. But that didn’t make sense, either. They were US Marshals. If they knew who she was, they’d simply take her in. She was being paranoid.
“I’ll leave you alone,” Isabelle said, spinning to rush toward the door. “I’m sorry I interrupted.”
“We can talk more about Tom tomorrow, if you want,” Jill offered.
Isabelle was actually confused for a moment, forgetting why she’d come here in the first place. “No big deal,” she finally said. “I was just being neurotic. It’s a casual thing with him.”
“If you say so.”
She’d tugged on her boots and was out the door in ten seconds flat. Jill turned on the porch light, startling Isabelle, and she suddenly felt far more vulnerable than she had on the walk over.
Practically leaping down the stairs, she rushed into the deep snow, trying to escape the reach of the lightbulb. Someone might be watching. Not an unknown survivalist, but an FBI agent who knew exactly who she was.
Instead of marching straight across the rocky field that separated their houses, Isabelle moved toward the back of Jill’s house and ducked into the trees just behind it. She stopped there, back pressed to a tree, eyes closed, trying to catch her breath.
What if Tom had realized who she was? No. Tom wouldn’t have lied to her this whole time. He couldn’t have.
Except that he could have. Everyone was capable of deception. She’d learned that from her own father. And she was hardly an exception. Her entire identity was a lie.
She had to be logical, so Isabelle ignored the pain that twisted through her stomach and considered the possibility that Tom knew. He would’ve contacted the FBI, and they could’ve told him to back off. They wanted her father, after all. They might want to watch and wait, set up another sting to see if Malcolm Pozniak got in touch. Or maybe they suspected he was living somewhere nearby, leaning on his daughter as his contact with the world.
As if she would’ve done that. Her dad had confessed to her. That he’d done lots of bad things. That he’d shot that officer.
She might have forgiven him eventually. Even though he’d been her hero, and everything about that had been a terrible, world-shifting lie, maybe she could have forgiven him and loved him and gone to prison to visit on holidays.
Maybe. If he hadn’t run and left her to face the very men he’d been afraid of.
They’d started visiting right away. Men she’d known her whole life; men who’d patted her on the head and called her sweetie. They’d pretended to be checking on her at first, but that hadn’t lasted long. Soon enough they’d started pressuring her, and then threatening, and finally she’d come home from class to find that the house she’d grown up in had been ransacked.
She hadn’t called 911. She’d been too scared to. Instead, she’d called her fiancé’s father. She’d trusted him to take care of her.
What a helpless idiot she’d been.
Isabelle opened her eyes. All she could see was falling snow and three or four trees in front of her. Which meant that was all anyone else could see. She was being stupid again. Panicked. She was right back to that fear she’d felt fourteen years before.
“Fuck this,” she whispered, glad no one else could hear how pitiful it sounded.
She was a grown woman now. A woman who’d stood alone and made her own life. A woman who’d walked away from everything she’d ever known.
She could take care of this problem, too. She’d figure out what was going on, and she’d fucking deal with it.
Isabelle set off through the snow, determined not to be afraid of her own house or the night that surrounded it. If the FBI had found her, then she’d face the consequences of what she’d done. Maybe it would be a relief.
She’d spent many sleepless nights wishing she could go back and make a different choice. Turn over the evidence her dad had asked her to hide, tell the truth and then disappear.
But she hadn’t known whom to trust. What if she’d taken the gun to the wrong person? What if she’d told her story to yet another dirty cop and found herself dead for her troubles?
No, running hadn’t been the wrong choice, but she wouldn’t do it the same way again.
At least the snow was a comfort tonight. She stopped a few dozen feet from her front steps and looked around. No one had been here since this afternoon. No one was hiding on her dark porch, waiting for her to approach.
She was alone. Exactly the way she needed to be. And if she wanted Tom here so much that it brought tears to her eyes, that was nothing but the aftermath of shock and fear.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
TOM NOTICED THE fed in the suit right away. The guy was standing a few feet from the meeting room door, a visitor’s pass clipped to his expensive suit jacket. Not the normal FBI agent uniform, and Tom might have mistaken him for an a
ttorney, but he’d looked up Agent Gates’s record, and Tom recognized the face.