I was valuable to Justine and her crew, but I wasn’t stupid enough to count on that alone. Always have a backup plan. One of my father’s earliest lessons.
Thinking of him, my feet followed a familiar route automatically, leading me to my old house before I realized what I was doing.
A FOR SALE sign leaned crookedly in the yard, accumulating snow on the sign post, and there were tire tracks in the driveway. A few more steps down the sidewalk revealed a dark blue SUV full of boxes, the cargo door open for unloading.
Of course. GTX wouldn’t, or couldn’t, hold on to the house now. They’d sell it if only to provide more distance between anything that could connect me to them.
A man in a baseball cap and a heavy denim jacket walked out on the front porch and moved stiffly down the steps to the vehicle.
My breath caught in my throat. He looked like my father. But he’d just been on my mind, so perhaps it was simply wishful thinking. I’d asked Justine to find him, to ask him to serve as my guardian, but she’d told me they had no luck. I hadn’t been surprised to hear that, but definitely disappointed. I’d learned a lot from him, and not all of it had come from a training manual. He was my father, for better or for worse, the only one I would ever have. I refused to consider any other possibility.
The man at my former home must have sensed someone watching. He stopped on the edge of the driveway and turned to face me. “You going to just stand there, or are you going to help me load this stuff?” he demanded. The brim of his hat shadowed his features, but his voice left absolutely no doubt.
It was my father.
Stunned, I hurried forward, my feet kicking up small whirlwinds of snow. “What are you doing here?” I asked, wrestling one end of a box out of the cargo area.
“No,” he said. “The other way. We’re moving out.”
I let go of the box and stared at him. “What?”
“The apartment is a fresh start. I agreed with them on that. It’s important, but I don’t see any reason why we should abandon everything,” he said. He dug into the open top of the closest cardboard box and produced our silver toaster. “I, for example, have no emotional attachment to this toaster. I can’t see a reason to spend twenty bucks on a new one.”
“Good point,” I said, even though I still had no idea what he was talking about overall. I hesitated. “But does this mean…Are you working for Justine?” I steeled myself to hear the answer. I didn’t mind if he was being paid to keep an eye on me again, but I wanted to know this time.
“No,” he said sharply. Then he took a breath and let it out in a sigh. “No,” he said again, in a softer voice. “That was a mistake I’m not making again. I’m retired. I’m not working for anyone anymore.”
“But then I don’t understand….”
“They found me after that mess in Chicago. Well,” he amended, “I found them. A few weeks ago.”
I nodded. That made more sense to me. He could have disappeared forever. I had no doubt of that.
“That woman, Justine, told me the deal you’d negotiated.” His voice held gruff admiration. “You really held their feet to the fire.”
I shrugged, as if I didn’t care, but the unexpected warmth of the compliment filled me. “I learned from the best.”
He rolled his eyes. “Save it for someone who’s buying, kid.”
I grinned, the familiarity of his words providing that sense of home I’d been missing. But I still had questions. “So, if you’re not working for them, then who is?” Someone had to be. There was no way Justine would let me have that much unsupervised freedom, not until she got more of what she wanted from me.
“They’ll still have an agent on site,” my father said. “Marta something or other. She’ll have her own apartment next to ours, I guess. I’m not quite sure of the setup. They’re playing it pretty close to the vest. They didn’t even tell me you were showing up today.” He frowned. “You know they probably have trackers in some or all of your new clothes.” He nodded at my coat.
“I’m sure,” I agreed with a shrug. “But I didn’t see any reason to cause panic by removing them before I needed to.”
“True. But it would be a shame if some of them met their end through an accidental scrubbing or a rough trip at the dry cleaners. Just to keep Justine and Marta”—he made a face, which made me think he’d met the painfully humorless DHS agent already—“on their toes.”
I grinned. “It would.”
“You know not all of this is going to fit,” I said, looking at the house and considering the floor plans I’d seen of the two-bedroom apartment.
“We’ll take the important stuff,” he said.
“All of it,” I added, hoping he knew I meant the photos and items from his former life with his wife and daughter. He’d hidden his past in the basement for too long.
He nodded wordlessly, his bright blue eyes a little damp.
Then he said, “And if we run out of space, I think I know a place where I can get a good deal on a storage unit.”