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But there was something about Everly Campbell that was lodged beneath his skin whether he liked it or not. She seemed to get in deeper each day he spent with her. He didn’t like anything about it, and camping out in her apartment, waiting for the next shoe to drop, didn’t make it any better.
He told himself it was that Everly reminded him of a past he didn’t want to think about. She’d been a part of that past, now they were near their old hometown, and it was all too much. Too many ghosts. Too many memories.
The only way Blue could think of to deal with that was to want things he couldn’t have.
Because sex would make things simple. He could scratch an itch, vanquish a ghost, and be done. He could move on, do his job, and forget about Everly all over again.
He told himself it could all be that easily handled.
But he knew better. Deep down, he knew better. He doubted there would ever be any forgetting Everly, and the fact that she was all tangled up in his memories made it worse.
That was why he wanted to call this thing solved right now and leave. He didn’t want tofeelall this old, ugly crap. He didn’t want to feel anything.
And certainly notthis,he thought, about twenty-four hours after they’d touched down in Chicago, as he stood there in Everly’s pretty, overtly feminine living room, all sage greens and soft, inviting creams, looking down at her as she sat on the brightly colored sofa and scrolled through Rebecca’s posts.
He watched her cycle through hope, then suspicion, then despair, and he was too tense. As if he were feeling it allforher. He wanted to jump in and fix it, fix her, fix whatever the hell put that broken look on her face. And maybe slap it around, too, while he was at it. He wanted things he didn’t know how to name.
Hewanted.
That was the problem with this whole thing.
“You must think I’m crazy,” Everly said quietly. She set his tablet beside her on the sofa as if she thought it might bite her if she picked it up again, and she laced her fingers together on her lap. “I’ll be honest with you. I kind of think I’m crazy, even though I was here and I know what I saw, because that’s the only explanation. Isn’t it?”
She was sitting in the dead center of her couch, stiff and still. And her knuckles were turning white, telling him she was gripping herself much too hard. Something about it—about her—made his chest hurt.
“I don’t think you’re crazy.”
He wasn’t lying. He didn’t think she was crazy no matter what the Chicago detectives thought. But there was a big part of him—and bigger by the moment—that wanted to accept that explanation.
It was the part of him that had joined the navy and never looked back, he realized with a sudden jolt now.
He really, really didn’t want to make that connection. But he’d never tried to fix things with his mother or anyone else in that house. He’d never tried to find a way forward with the only family he had left. He’d just disappeared.
He wanted to do the same thing now. And not because he didn’t think he could help Everly. But because helping her was the least of the things he wanted when he looked at her.
He wasn’t thrilled with what that said about him. What any of this said about him.
Everly was still talking. “But that’s the thing about a psychotic break, isn’t it? Would I even know if I was having one? Isn’t that the whole deal? You just... break? And the next thing you know, you’re imagining murders and driving across the Yukon?”
“I’m pretty sureI’mnot having a psychotic break.” Blue had to cross his arms over his chest to keep from going to her and doing something that made absolutely no sense. As if touching her would make that haunted, broken look on her face go away. Or was he hoping itwould make that ache in him disappear? “And I don’t have to be a computer genius to know that anybody could have left a note here. Just like anybody could have sent an e-mail or posted a few things online. Proof of life has been suggested, not established.”
“I don’t know if that’s comforting or terrifying.”
Neither did Blue. But he didn’t think it would exactly inspire confidence to admit that.
“Here’s the plan,” he told her instead. “You’ll jump back into your normal routine tomorrow. We’ll just... wait and see what happens.”
“Okay.” She looked at her hands, still threaded there in her lap. “So if I turn to you one day and tell you I see a dragon in the corner, psychotic break it is.”
“If the dragon in the corner is some idiot with a gun, maybe it’s something else. Either way, I’ll take care of it.”
She studied him for a minute, those green eyes of hers too intense. Too sad, as if she already knew this would all end badly.
It killed him how much he wanted to promise her it would all be okay—but Blue wasn’t sure if he’d be talking about this situation of hers or himself.
“Tell me what a normal week looks like for you,” he said instead, and it felt like his jaw was made of granite.
“Pretty boring,” Everly replied. She lifted her shoulders, then let them sink down again. “I work long and irregular hours. Then I come home, where I eat food I suspect you would not approve of and watch television that I feel, in my heart, you would hate.”