“Wednesday at noon is fine.”
“All right.”
He almost winced at the robotic response. She knew she was freaking him out, but she was powerless to stop it. She stopped in front of the elevator and turned back with a look of pure desperation on her face. She had already revealed so much. Emma didn’t know how he knew, or if he knew, but he stepped up next to her and said quietly, “Can I see you out?” She nodded, and he gently guided her into the elevator by her elbow. She peered up from staring at her feet to meet his emerald gaze and said the only thing she could think of.
“Thank you.”
When the elevator stopped in the lobby, Emma forced a smile and told him she could take it from there. He nodded from the elevator and lifted his hand in a motionless wave as the doors slid closed. As she turned to make her way out of the lobby, she looked at her dangling hand and realized she still held the fishing photo from the box.
She sat in the back of the Range Rover uncharacteristically silent. She had been broken as a child, then glued back together and now, in an incredibly careless move, she had put herself in a position to be shattered.
She needed to call her father. She needed Caroline. And she needed to confront the sad reality that she had to stay away from Nathan Bishop. Her life wasn’t real. It was invented, but she had no other option. And she was happy. Emma Porter was a comfortably well-off, attractive college graduate, living in the big city and cutting her teeth as a reporter. Emily Webster was an American tragedy; the daughter of one of the richest families in the world, abducted as a child and never found. She was the twenty-first century Lindbergh baby.
The thought of never seeing Nathan again made her feel sick. She was incomplete; she knew that, but what she didn’t know was that something could fill that void. Being with him was like coming home; every ounce of her being was drawn to him. It was like her whole life had been a tornado, and Nathan calmed the winds. None of that mattered, though, if being with him was going to shatter her. She couldn’t be Emma Porter with him, and she couldn’t be Emily Webster because Emily Webster didn’t exist.
Emma called Nathan’s assistant and canceled their next two interviews. She didn’t give an excuse. She planned on calling Farrell and seeing if he could finish the piece. Wildly unprofessional, she knew, but she would explain that Nathan was hitting on her or making her feel uncomfortable. That was shitty, but it would do the trick. It would be a huge slap in the face to Nathan to betray him by broadcasting his behavior at their first meeting, but that would be an additional sad but effective side-effect: he wouldn’t want anything to do with her.
The thought turned Emma into a zombie. She crawled into bed wearing a camisole and yoga pants, the cornflower blue tie wrapped around her knuckles like a boxer’s tape, and wailed, then cried, then sniffled, then slept. She recalled the vaguely familiar sensation from her childhood when Nathan went away to school. Back then, she had burrowed into a small space between his laundry hamper and the wall in his closet and hid; that was before small spaces did a number on her. She was different now, more complicated, but she still felt... desolate. She had once again been given that indescribable feeling of... wholeness, only to, once again, have it ripped away. It was all she could do to call The Sentry and leave a message that she had the flu. She texted her father the same thing. CNN had sent Caroline to Idaho to cover some sort of standoff between the feds and a cult. She was alone.