Chapter 6

After Pearl and Gideon ate, she quickly cleaned the kitchen and looked over at him. "I don't know whether that was lunch or dinner," she said in a half-joking manner.

"It's close enough to dinner that we'll call it a done deal. If you're hungry later, there's always leftovers," he suggested. "As long as you haven't fed them to a stray by then."

Smiling at the joke, she replied, "Thanks for being a good sport about that. A puppy is the last thing we need to be dealing with, but it seemed like the thing to do at the time."

"In light of the circumstances, it probably worked out for the best," Gideon conceded. "I did tell you to make yourself at home."

"Thanks." She hesitated and added meekly, "Would you mind if I had a shower and just called it a night?"

He nodded. "That's fine, as long as you're not running away."

Heat flushed through her face, immediately draining away everything inside her. She sagged into the kitchen chair, just staring at him, wordless.

He sat down across from her and picked up her hands. "I'm sorry. That was a cheap shot."

"No," she whispered, "I deserved it."

He shook his head. "You can stop that talk anytime," he muttered. "It's not about you."

"It might be about me now." She shook her head. "I feel like I'm…" Then she laughed and just left it at that. She was not sure how to say anything right now. "It's always about me, isn't it?" she muttered, with a moan. "It's not supposed to be that way, and honestly, it's not about me. It's about us. It's about who I should be, not who I am."

"And again, that's not the person you were," he stated, staring at her oddly.

"Yeah,… well, five years of realizing I walked away from something I wanted to keep does that to me. It hasn't been an easy thing to come to terms with. I have blamed myself time and time again for my actions."

"So why didn't you reach out in all that time?" he asked. "Why not make a call or send me a text, anything just to say, Hey, I'm alive . I've been away a lot on various assignments, but my base has always been here at Coronado."

"I did try the base, until I realized you'd left. Then I just saw a closed door in front of me." She glanced over at him, a corner of her mouth tilting upward. It was all she could manage in the form of a smile. "Think about how you would feel if you ever did anything embarrassing like that. At the time, I hadn't realized that I was running away," she noted, with a shrug. "I did check on your status a couple times but discovered you were out of the country again, so that was that."

"I guess I can understand to some degree," he murmured. "I just wish that you had reached out, mostly because it was hell not knowing if you were okay. It was hell knowing that you had completely washed me out of your life after what? After five years together?"

"Five years together, then five years apart," she whispered, with a nod. "It seems so surreal to even see you seated across from me right now."

He shook his head, got up, and walked around. "I don't know about surreal, but I'm definitely having some trouble adapting."

She smiled. "Yet you're the one who was always good at adapting to situations." She felt the brunt of everything hitting her at the same time. "It's why you're so good at what you do," she murmured. "You have always been good at quickly adjusting."

"You think so?" he asked, with a half laugh. "For the record, I didn't adapt very well after you left. Not with no explanation, nothing more than just a sudden, Hey, I need something new in my life , or whatever you told me."

Her breath sucked back and froze in her chest for a long moment, before she managed to release the pain inside along with her pent-up breath. "I'm sorry."

He glared at her. " Sorry ? Fuck the whole I'm sorry part," he spat, "because, in case you hadn't noticed, I still harbor a hell of a lot of anger inside me."

"I can see that," she acknowledged, without moving, staring at him like a hawk.

He groaned as he sat down, she could see he was holding back the onslaught of everything he had kept buried for so long, boiling under the surface all the time. "The thing about my anger is that it masks something else," he admitted, "and, in this case, fear. Fear that I'd lost you, fear that you were gone from my life forever. Fear that you had some disease, that you had another lover, that you had something I didn't know about. You were closed off to the point that I couldn't even reach you. I didn't even know what the problem was, and it happened so fast. My mind went from a cancer diagnosis to a new love to sudden depression, and I couldn't figure it out."

She shook her head. "Can we just say I was having a moment?"

"Yeah, a five-year moment," he noted in a deadpan tone.

For the first time—in between all the drama of the day—the humor of it struck her, and she laughed. "Yes, I guess that's one way to look at it."

"That's true," he muttered, as he tried to relax into his seat. "So, where do we go from here?"

"I don't know.… Is there anywhere to go?" She looked around, then winced at the audacity of it all. "I'm in your house, having called you, begging for help." She shook her head. "I had no idea who else to turn to. You were automatically the one person I called out for, when I was scared and in trouble."

"That's a good thing," he said, his tone very gentle. "Of all of the people you know, I'm one of the few who deals in this stuff."

"What was this stuff anyway?" she asked. "It makes no sense. Why would that guy be in my house?"

"He was waiting for you, but again it had more to do with your location."

She stared at him, recalling that he had mentioned it before, but she wasn't getting anything new from what he was saying.

"Do you know your neighbors?" he asked.

"My neighbors?" she repeated, then turned back to him. "We already went over this."

"Do you know what they drive? Do you remember if they put the garbage out on a regular basis? Do you know if they get a lot of visitors? Do you know anything about them at all?"

She immediately shook her head. "No, I don't. Honestly, I work hard, come home, and then, with all the extra BS at work, my home is where I just hide away," she explained, speaking too slowly for him. "I've hardly even gone out for anything." She shrugged her shoulders. "Of course after my parents died, that just made it all worse."

"Wait, what? Your parents died?" he asked, staring at her in shock.

She winced. She hadn't even left him so much as a message about that. "Yeah, a few months after I left. A car accident."

"Good God." He stared at her. "You loved your parents."

"I did, and still do in many ways," she replied, with a smile. "Obviously they're dead, and their passing was one of those major turning points in life. So, on top of losing you—though that was my own fault—then I lost them.… I was lost in a big way."

He grasped her hands. "I'm sorry, sweetheart. I wish you had told me."

"I do too. Seriously, I do because I felt incredibly isolated from the world at that point. They were all I had. We had some issues with the estate that took me a bit to sort out, plus issues with the lawyer. We didn't have the new will supposedly, and that was just one more of the things that seem so trivial now. Still, at the time, it was hard to get through," she murmured.

"What was the issue?"

"My parents had told me very specifically that they wanted to be cremated, but their will that the lawyer had said something completely different. So I had to fight the lawyer about it. He wanted to handle everything himself, and he fought for control. Of course he was a good friend of theirs."

"Of course, but that doesn't make it any easier, does it?"

"No, not at all. I'm glad I had the last six months with them. I would like to think that I had some foreknowledge that it would all happen, and that's why I went home," she shared, "but that's not true. I didn't have any way to know. If I had known, I absolutely would have come home, and who knows? Maybe I wouldn't have cut you out."

"No way to know at this point," Gideon noted. "Anyway, let's not keep going back over the same issues. So, did you have them dealt with the way you wanted to?"

She nodded. "I did, finally. It wasn't fun or pleasant, but then I also had to sell their house. It was never my house to begin with, as you recall." She snorted. "It never felt like home to me, and I never lived there, so it was very much their place. I didn't want to live back East or keep the house, but selling it—although it didn't take all that long—was still a long time."

She took a moment to collect herself. "The process of cleaning out the house was pretty horrific at the end of the day," she shared. "I spent that first year, year and a half, just dealing with things pertaining to my parents that had to be dealt with. By the time I lifted my head, even more time had gone by, and I just didn't know how to go back."

"Yet you're here."

"I'm here. After everything was sold, I ended up with a job in one of the hospitals, and it was fine, but I didn't feel like I had a real purpose. Eventually I started seeing a therapist." She gave him a mocking smile. "I didn't know I needed it, but I am forever grateful to the woman who helped me get my head on straight. At that point in time, I wasn't sure what straight even looked like." She gave a small laugh. "It's amazing how screwed up you can be and not even know it."

"I think it happens to a lot of people, particularly after some major life changes like that."

She nodded. "That's basically what happened to me. Anyway, through it all, I realized that, of all the things I regretted, the biggest mistake I made was walking away from you," she admitted, with a smile and a straight face. "My therapist always wanted me to come back and talk to you."

"Which would have been a sensible decision," he added.

"Sure, but it had already been years by then—three, I think. We were into the third year by that point in time, and I didn't know how to make that happen. When a job came up here about six months later, I applied for it, and it was another six months or so before I heard from them, got the job, and signed back up again." She smiled. "Then suddenly I found myself here, only to find out that you were not." She sighed, remembering just how much of a shock that had been, something she still struggled to accept.

"So, you didn't do any research before you came back?"

She looked over at him and shook her head. "None. For some reason I just assumed that the man I had always been the happiest with would have stayed here."

"Maybe. Except the man who was always the happiest here had lost the one thing that made him happy. So this no longer felt like home. It just became a place. I tried to make it mine, even getting this house, but it still never felt quite right. When I got an opportunity to go overseas, I took it. I needed the change and something else to look at, like a new view on life," he shared. "I popped in and out of here occasionally, checking on the house and all. Sometimes I rented it out to guys for short-term stays here and there, so it didn't just sit here vacant."

She nodded. "Did you ever find anybody else?" she asked, hating that the question half choked her up.

He immediately shook his head. "Not on a long-term basis. I tried a couple relationships, but I was still hurting," he replied, "and trust was a big issue."

" Right , I can understand that."

"Can you?" he asked intently. "When you did what you did for no reason, it messed with my head. Every imaginable excuse came to me, but absolutely none of them made any sense. I couldn't make heads or tails out of it. So, I tended to look at every relationship after that as being short-term because there probably wouldn't ever be anything long-term." She winced, opened her mouth, and he immediately squeezed her fingers. "Don't you dare say you're sorry."

Her shoulders slumped, as she nodded. "And yet I am. It was one thing to hurt myself through all this. It was quite another to hurt you."

He burst out laughing. "I am hardly innocent in all this." He shook his head. "I could have reached out to you. I could have actively tried to figure out what was going on. I am an investigator, after all. I could have tried harder to stay in touch. Let's face it. I could have done a million things, but instead I let you go. Mostly because I was hurting and confused. I just didn't understand, so I kept on hiding."

Surprised, she raised an eyebrow at the phrase.

He nodded. "That's what happens when people get hurt. We go inside and just hide because it feels better than not hiding. We don't want anybody to ask questions, and we sure as hell don't want to explain it to anybody. Hell, I didn't have any explanation."

"I understand that too."

"What could I say to people? Yeah, she just walked out. No, I have no idea why . Everybody would have just laughed me off the street, and yet it was the truth."

"Yes, it was," she muttered, and then she groaned. "Life's a mess, isn't it?"

"It certainly can be." Just then his phone rang. He got up and answered it, then took one look at her and pointed behind him. "I have to take this in the other room."

She nodded and watched as he walked away. She stared around the kitchen, wondering at his need to talk, versus letting her run off to bed. Running away to her room would have been easier. Yet, at this moment, she was glad that he had encouraged her to stay, and together they confronted the elephant in the room. It was a little easier to talk to him now, though she didn't expect it to make things easier in the long term. Still, anything that made it easier in the short term was a blessing.

When he rejoined her, a frown evident on his face, she got worried. "What's up?"

"I've got to step out," he said.

"Okay, go." She gave a wave of her hand. "You don't need to babysit me."

He laughed. "That's partly why you're here. You know that, right?"

"What? So you can watch over me?"

"Yes. The gunman was at your house, and we don't yet know if he had an ulterior motive for choosing your house versus another house or whether somebody is worried that they were seen or that you saw something."

"I don't have the slightest idea what any of this is all about in the first place," she replied. "So, you do you, but I don't see how your leaving the house is an issue."

"Lock up behind me, and we'll have a black-and-white unit cruise by several times and check up on you."

She stared at him. "I gather you'll be gone a long time?"

"I have no idea," he answered honestly, "but sometimes, when I have to go, I have to go for a while."

"Right." She nodded. "I plan on going to bed and getting some rest anyway. So anything that you need to do, go do it," she said. "I'm not here to hold you back in any way. So please continue to work as you've always worked."

He laughed. "That'll be a little hard to do when you're sitting here in my house after all these years."

"Right, but it's not as if anything has changed."

He stared at her, his face grim. "And that's enough of that BS too," he declared, with an intense searching gaze, "because the truth is, everything has changed."