Now though, Paige picked up straight away. Almost losing her mother those few months back, when Adam Riker had kidnapped her and tried to get Paige to kill her, had been a kind of catalyst for the two of them to start talking again. Paige had even been down to Virginia a couple of times to see her, before she’d enrolled with the FBI.
“Hey Mom,” Paige said, sitting back on her neatly made bed. “Is everything ok over there? Are you ok?”
That had been one of Paige’s biggest worries in the last few months: that the brush with death would leave a mark on her mother that she wouldn’t be able to shake. An event like that had to inspire some level of PTSD, didn’t it? That moment, that whole attempt to find Adam after he escaped from a secure psychiatric institution, had certainly left its marks on Paige. She saw his victims in her dreams at night, along with the moment that she’d shot him.
“I’m fine,” her mother said.
“Are you sure?” Paige asked. Her mother was the kind of person who would probably say that things were fine even when they were anything but that. It was something she’d definitely done when Paige was a kid, first not talking about her father’s death at the hands of a serial killer, and then about the abuse that Paige had suffered at the hands of her stepfather, as if ignoring it would make it all go away.
Paige realized now that not talking had been her mother’s way of trying to cope with things. The only problem with that was that Paige had needed to talk about it almost as much as her mother had needed not to. It had left Paige feeling as if her mother didn’t care, had left her resentful and only too eager to get away from home when the time had come to go to college.
Yet, when Adam had tried to tell her how much she hated her mother, when he’d told her to shoot her mother, she’d realized that she didn’t feel that kind of resentment. She didn’t hate her mother, didn’t blame her for what had happened. Paige loved her. None of it had been her mother’s fault, and she’d done everything she could to keep Paige safe.
“I’m sure,” her mother said. “Things have been going… actually, pretty well. Did I tell you that I got a promotion at my job?”
“No,” Paige said.
“Well, not really a promotion, more that Mr. Phelps, my boss, just wants me to take on a few extra responsibilities. Of course, that means that I’ve had to cut back on my Tuesday book club a bit, but the extra money comes in handy, and I still see most of the girls for drinks on the weekend. Sandy has a new man in her life, and Emma…”
Paige let the flood of small talk about life in an even smaller town wash over her, grateful to hear about a life that was just normal compared to hers. It wasn’t a life she could live, but she was glad that it was a life her mother got to be happy with. She was glad that her mother got to have a life without violence, after everything that had happened.
“What about you?” her mother asked after a little while. “How are things going over at the FBI?”
Paige tried to decide how much to tell her mother. “The training is tough,” Paige said, “but I’m hanging in there. I can handle it.”
“I still can’t quite believe that’s where you decided you wanted to go next with your life,” her mother said. “I thought when you finished your PhD you might be done with killers and criminals, but now you’re going to be actively chasing them.”
That was one thing that didn’t seem to have changed. Her mother still didn’t quite seem to get how important it was for Paige to understand more about the criminal mind. Possibly, she would never quite get it. After all, her mother’s response to her husband’s death had been to run away from it as hard as she could.
“It’s what I want to do, Mom. It’s where I can make a difference.”
“But you’ll be in danger in the FBI.”
“I can handle the danger, Mom,” Paige said. She hoped that it was true.
Paige found her conversation interrupted by a knock at the door of her room.
“Sorry, Mom, I have to go. Someone’s here to see me.”
“Ok, Paige. Stay safe. I hope I’ll see you soon. I love you.”
“I love you too, Mom.”
Paige hung up and then hurried over to the door. She was surprised to see one of the other people there in the course outside, a young man with a buzz cut and built like a linebacker, looking at her with a serious expression.
“Paige King? You are to report to the administrator’s office at once.” Something about his tone made it sound both serious and urgent, and that tone worried Paige.
She frowned at the demand. “What’s this about?”
“I wasn’t told. Only that you have to come now.”
Paige nodded. If she was going to join the FBI, she had to get used to following orders. “All right. I’m on my way.”
Paige started to make her way through the training facility, heading down through the dorm that held the prospective agents and then out into a broad courtyard that had other dorm blocks on three sides. Behind them were the training buildings and classrooms used to prepare her and the others for their potential future jobs as FBI agents. There were whole replica houses there to practice close quarter battle and breaches in hostage situations, a track designed to teach defensive driving, and a gun range.
Paige didn’t make her way towards any of those, however, but instead headed for the small administrative building near the front of the campus. It was old with large windows and ivy growing up the walls, an almost Victorian look to the architecture. As she walked, she tried to work out what this was about, and the more Paige thought about it, the more the walk filled her with a sense of impending dread.
Previously, the only people she’d seen summoned in this way had been people who hadn’t been making the cut, or who had managed to break the rules. They’d been called there to be told that they were being let go from the program, and that their things would be waiting by the gate. There weren’t a lot of second chances when the program was meant to turn out people who could protect the public and catch bad guys.