“You think you’ll see me again?” Paige asked.
Christopher smiled then. “I hope so.”
*
The rewrites to Paige’s thesis weren’t going well. It turned out that there was nothing worse for a PhD thesis than a last-minute shift in perspective, because it meant that almost everything had to be reworked. Paige couldn’t leave it as it was, though, not after everything that had happened.
There were whole sections to add on the things that had happened since Adam’s escape, and on the ways that he’d obviously manipulated her during the sessions.
Paige wasn’t managing to write them yet, though, because she found that she couldn’t focus. Other thoughts kept distracting her. Some were of her mom, hoping that she was ok. Some were of Christopher, because wife or not, gone from her life or not, it still felt as if they’d forged some kind of connection working on the case that went deep.
Her phone rang. It was Prof. Thornton. Paige answered quickly.
“Hey, is everything ok?” she asked.
“Better than ok, Paige,” he said. “I have some great news for you.”
Paige frowned, not quite knowing what to expect. “What kind of great news?”
“I was talking to a couple of friends about your work, and they’re very impressed. They have a research project running on criminal psychology, and they’re looking for a postdoc to work with them conducting inmate interviews. They’d like to talk to you about the job.”
A couple of weeks ago, that would have been exactly the kind of news Paige wanted to hear more than anything. It would have been a step along the route to her dreams, and exactly the kind of first step on the ladder in academia that she knew was so hard to find.
Now, though, she found herself hesitating.
“Paige?” Prof. Thornton said. “Did you hear me?”
“I heard,” Paige said. “Sorry, I’m still trying to process this.”
Before, she wouldn’t have needed to process. Now, though, it felt as though everything that had happened in the last few days had woken something up in her. A shift in who she was, or maybe just in what she wanted.
Now, Paige found herself thinking about what Christopher had said about her making a good profiler. Something about that felt right, congruent. Like it was a missing piece of something that Paige had been waiting for.
“That’s understandable,” Prof. Thornton said. “I’m sure I can hold them off for a day or so if you need some time. But this really is a good opportunity, Paige.”
“It is,” Paige agreed. Then she said the part that seemed obvious to her now, even if it wouldn’t have before. “But I don’t want it.”
“You don’t want it?”
“I want… all of this has shown me that I want to do something else,” Paige said. “I want to do some good with my work. I want… I want to become a profiler.”
She knew in that moment that, as soon as she finished her thesis, Paige was going to apply to join the FBI. She understood serial killers as well as anyone else out there, but what use was that knowledge if she didn’t use it to stop them?
Maybe it would even put her in a position where she could finally look for the serial killer who had touched her life so sharply when she was a girl.
Maybe, just maybe, she would finally be able to find the man who had killed her father.