Page 15 of Girl, Forgotten (Andrea Oliver 2)

“I don’t remember getting that message. Was it in a text? Voicemail?”

“Carrier pigeon,” she quipped. “Didn’t you get the tweet?”

The lights were off inside of the utilitarian office building, but the air conditioning made it the most beautiful place Andrea had ever been. She felt her skin tingle as the sweat dried.

Mike turned uncharacteristically silent as he walked down the hall and opened the door to the stairwell. Andrea let him go ahead of her for the sake of feminism and also to enjoy the view from behind. The lean muscles of his legs stretched against his tailored pants. His strong hand gripped the railing as he pulled himself up two steps at a time. Andrea had slept with boys before Mike, but he was the first man she had ever been with. He was so smart, so damn sure of himself. There hadn’t been a lot of room for her to be the same when she was around him.

He opened the door at the top of the stairs. “Tweets before twits.”

Andrea guessed she was the twit because Mike went first. She squinted down the dark hallway wondering what the hell they were doing here. This was Mike’s gift—he made her brain tune out the sensible things. She should be out of the shower by now. She was going to be late for her own graduation.

She asked, “Where are you taking me?”

“You’re the one who likes surprises.”

She was the exact opposite of the one who liked surprises, but she followed him into an empty conference room anyway.

The lights were off. Mike opened the blinds so that sunlight streamed in.

He said, “Have a seat.”

He technically outranked her, but Andrea was never going to follow Mike’s orders.

She walked around the room, which was used for surveillance and fugitive apprehension drills. The whiteboards were wiped clean now that classes were over. Framed portraits on the walls showed various Marshals of yore. Robert Forsyth, who in the 1790s was the first Marshal killed in the line of duty. Deputy Bass Reeves, the first black Marshal who served at the turn of the last century. Phoebe Couzins, who was not only the first female US Marshal but also one of the first women to graduate from law school in the United States.

The largest framed piece was a poster from the 1993 movie The Fugitive starring Harrison Ford as an escaped con and Tommy Lee Jones as the Marshal who tracked him down. Andrea supposed it was better than the giant Con Air poster with Nicolas Cage that adorned the break-out room in her dorm. Marshals didn’t often get the Hollywood treatment.

Mike stood in front of a giant map of the world. Blue pins dotted the various USMS outposts. The service was a tight community of roughly three thousand agents serving worldwide. They all either knew each other or knew someone who knew someone. It wasn’t lost on Andrea that her exile from Mike had landed her in a job where she was bound to run into him again.

He asked, “What’d you put in for?”

Andrea hadn’t made a specific request. She would get her assignment after graduation. “I asked for somewhere out west.”

“Far from home,” he said, knowing very well that was the point. “Have you decided what you want to do?”

She shrugged. “Depends, doesn’t it?”

To their credit, the USMS really wanted you to do the work that you wanted to do, so they put you through rotations your first year. For two weeks at a time, you got to do a little of each—fugitive apprehension, judicial security, asset forfeiture, prisoner operations and transport, sex offender management, the missing child program, and of course WitSec.

Andrea’s hope was that a giant lightbulb would turn on once she found her calling. Failing that, there was always the excellent retirement package and paid time off.

Mike said, “Those offices are tiny out west. Not a lot of local manpower to lean on. You’ll probably be hookin’ and haulin’ most of the time.”

He was talking about prisoner transport. Andrea shrugged. “You’ve gotta start somewhere.”

“That’s a fact.” Mike walked over to the window. He looked out at the practice field. “It’ll be another few minutes. Why don’t you sit down?”

Andrea should’ve pushed for more transparency, but she could only stare at his broad shoulders. The sexiest thing about Mike Vargas wasn’t his muscular body or his deep voice or even his hot new beard. He had a way of talking to Andrea that made her feel like she was the only person he had ever shared anything with. Like that he loved magical realism yet didn’t buy into books with dragons. That his feet were ticklish and he hated being cold. That he sometimes resented but always loved his three bossy older sisters. That when he was a kid, his saint of a mother had worked two jobs to keep the family fed but he would’ve gladly skipped a meal in order to spend more time with her. That he had lied to Andrea about his father the first time they had talked about their families.

That Mike was ten years old when his dad had gotten up in the middle of the night to confront what he thought was an intruder and accidentally shot Mike’s teenage brother in the head.

That sometimes Mike could still hear the harrowing thump of his dead brother’s body hitting the wooden floor.

That sometimes Mike thought he was hearing the other thump of his dad’s body when the man had killed himself with the same gun one week later.

“Hey, I almost forgot.” Mike was smiling when he turned back around. “I was going to offer you some advice.”

Andrea loved his teasing tone. “My favorite thing is unsolicited advice.”