The Witness

today.”
    “I don’t know if I’ll have the courage tomorrow.”
    “Then tell me what you’re afraid of.”
    “So many things. But now, most of all? That if I tell you everything, you won’t feel the same about me—and for me.”
    Brooks reached down, picked up a stick, threw it. Bert looked at Abigail, got her signal and chased after it. “Love doesn’t turn on and off like a light switch.”
    “I don’t know. I’ve never been in love. I’m afraid to lose it, and you. And this. All of this. You have a duty, but more, you have a code. I knew a man like you, more like you than I realized at first. He died protecting me.”
    “From whom?”
    “It’s complicated.”
    “Okay. Did he love you?”
    “Not the way I think you mean. It wasn’t romantic or sexual. It was duty. But he cared about me, beyond that. He was the first person who cared for me.” She pressed a hand to her heart. “Not for what I represented or what I accomplished, or what I was expected to be. But who I was.”
    “You said you don’t know who your father was, so not your father. A cop? Duty. Were you in witness protection, Abigail?”
    Her hand trembled. Did he see it or just sense it? she wondered. But he took it in his, warmed and stilled it.
    “I was being protected. I would have been given a new identity, a new life, but … it all went very wrong.”
    “How long ago?”
    “I was sixteen.”
    “Sixteen?”
    “I turned seventeen on the day …” John’s blood on her hands. “I’m not telling you the way I should. I never even imagined telling anyone.”
    “Why don’t you tell me the beginning?”
    “I’m not sure where it is. Maybe it was when I realized I didn’t want to be a doctor, and I knew that for certain in my first semester of pre-med.”
    “After things went very wrong?”
    “No. I’d completed pre-med, the requirement for medical school, by then. If I’d continued, per my mother’s agenda, I’d have continued into medical school the next fall.”
    “You said you were sixteen.”
    “Yes. I’m very smart. I took accelerated courses throughout my education. My first term at Harvard I lived with a family she selected. They were very strict. She paid them to be. Then I had one term on my own, in a dorm, but carefully supervised. I think my rebellion started the day I bought my first pair of jeans and a hoodie. It was thrilling.”
    “Back up. You were, at sixteen, in Harvard, in pre-med, and bought your first pair of jeans?”
    “My mother bought or supervised the acquiring of my wardrobe.” Because it still seemed huge to her, she smiled. “It was horrible. You wouldn’t have looked at me. I wanted, so much, to be like the other girls. I wanted to talk on the phone and text about boys. I wanted to look the way the girls my age looked. And God, God, I didn’t want to be a doctor. I wanted to apply to the FBI, to work in their cyber-crimes unit.”
    “I should’ve figured,” he murmured.
    “I monitored courses, studied online. If she’d known … I don’t know what she would have done.”
    She stopped at the view where she’d wanted a bench, and wondered if she’d ever have reason to buy one now. Now that it was too late to stop in the telling.
    “She’d promised me the summer off from studies. A trip, a week in New York, then the beach. She’d promised, and that had gotten me through the last term. But she’d made arrangements for me to participate in one of her associate’s summer programs. Intense study, lab work. It would have looked well on my record, accelerated my degree. And I—for the first time in my life—defied her.”
    “About damn time.”
    “Maybe, but it started a terrible chain of events. She was packing. She was covering for another associate, and keynoting at a conference. She’d be gone a week. And we argued. No, not accurate.” Annoyed with herself, Abigail shook her head.
    At such times, accuracy was vital.
    “She didn’t argue. There was simply her way, and she had no doubt I’d fall in line. She concluded my behavior, my demands, my attitude, was a normal phase. I’m sure she noted it down for my files. And she left me. The cook had been given two weeks off, so I was alone in the house. She left without a word while I was sulking in my room. I don’t know why I was so shocked she’d leave that way, but I was, sincerely shocked. Then I was angry, and maybe exhilarated. I took her car keys, and I drove to the mall.”
    “To the