Page 102 of Jessica, Not Her Real Name

He said, “That is a smartwatch.”

“Yeah,” she said, baffled.

“It syncs your location to your phone, right?”

She nodded.

“Your phone that went missing from your house back in Florida?”

“Yeah,” she said again, an uneasy note creeping into her tone.

“So, you’ve basically been walking around with a tracking device on your wrist this whole damn time. A tracking device that is currently beaming your location to a phone that we don’t know who has.”

She swallowed hard. “But everything is offline because of the storm. There’s no cell signal or mobile data. So surely it can’t be sending out any kind of signal?—”

“It can through its GPS receiver,” he interrupted. “Satellites. Nothing to do with cell or internet coverage.”

“But my phone is locked!”

“Is it an older phone?”

She paused. “It’s a couple of years old.”

He shook his head. “Then there are ways into it.”

She visibly paled, then stared down at her wrist in horror. “The silver Cadillac,” she whispered, her eyes darting back up to his. “The one that was following us.”

He nodded grimly.

With shaking fingers, she took the watch off and held it out to him like it was a bomb that was about to go off. He grabbed it, then turned and pitched it as hard as he could into the swamp beyond the road. He stared after it for a long moment, then he looked back at her and said, “This is why you have to stay in WITSEC.”

“No. This is why I have to stay with you.”

He sighed. “If I’d been doing my job properly, Jessica, you wouldn’t be in this mess.”

“What do you mean?”

He eyed her tiredly and scrubbed his hand through his hair. “I mean, I shouldn’t have let you leave Florida with that thing on your wrist.” He started walking back towards the pile of branches in the road. “You remember I told you to leave all your devices behind?”

She followed him. “Then it’s my fault, not yours.”

He stopped walking, just stood there in the road.

“I’m not going to Louisiana,” she said to his back. “And you can’t make me.”

No, he couldn’t. She wasn’t in his custody. She was free to leave him and the program anytime she wanted.

“Where will you go?” he said dully.

When she didn’t answer, he turned to face her. She rolled her eyes and raised her hands into the air. “Memphis,” she said, as if it should have been obvious. “With you.”

He stared at her like she’d just told him she was planning on moving to Mars. And while one part of him was ecstatic that she wanted to stay with him, a far more practical part of him knew it could never work.

He swallowed and shook his head. “I…it’s…it wouldn’t be allowed.”

“So we don’t tell anyone.”

He threw up a hand. “Jessica, I gotta answer to a bunch of people. People who are gonna wanna know what the hell happened here. Why you up and vanished mid-route and washed up back in Tennessee with me. And I don’t think we’ll be able to blame it on the hurricane.”