Robert paced in front of the window, feeling as if the morning had stretched into days. He wasn’t sure what time it was. Time had stopped and the world no longer made sense. The woman he loved had told him a story he couldn’t believe in spite of how much he tried.
Katie faced Robert on the sofa, not speaking. After explaining her reaction to the revelation about Janeal, she stilled and seemed to wait for Robert to respond.
The dry mountain air scratched Robert’s throat. There wasn’t enough oxygen in it to help his brain make sense of her claim.
What did she expect him to do? Buy the whole unfathomable explanation and go on with life as if it weren’t extraordinary? Call her a liar and demand she prove her claims?
Those were only two of a thousand possibilities. And he wasn’t sure his response mattered.
Robert’s cell phone rang. He ignored it.
After several minutes of silent musing and stolen glances at the woman on the sofa, he narrowed down what did matter to two things:
The identity of the woman he had fallen in love with this week.
And whether he could still love her if her story was true. Or a lie.
“You’re not Katie,” he said for the fourth or fifth time.
She shook her head patiently as if he’d only asked her once. “Katie died.”
“So who are you?”
“Janeal.”
“And who does that make . . . the other woman?”
“Janeal.”
“You can see the problem I have with that.”
“It’s a difficult claim, I understand.”
“It’s an unimaginable claim. Physically impossible. How did it happen?”
“I don’t know.”
“When did it happen? And don’t tell me during the fire. I want to know the precise moment. Because I can’t believe . . . well, I can’t believe any of it, but I don’t see how you could become . . . disembodied, or whatever you want to call it, without knowing it was happening.”
Katie nodded. “It must have happened when—”
“You’re telling me you don’t know the precise moment?”
“Precise? No. But I sensed something . . . supernatural happen. The moment I decided to help Katie.”
Robert couldn’t help it. He scoffed.
She pressed ahead. “I can’t explain why that was such a hard decision to make, but the mental strain—”
“Mental strain is a much more reasonable explanation for why you think you’re Janeal. I’ve had my own experience with survivor’s guilt—”
“That’s not what this is. And it can’t explain why two of us are claiming to be Janeal. Or why I’d empathize with someone who supposedly abandoned me to die.”
Robert didn’t have a comeback for that.
“Things harder to believe than this have happened,” she said.
“Like?”
“How does the Red Sea part? How does the sun stand still?”
“Stories.”
“Truth.”
“For you maybe.”
Katie sighed. “I couldn’t have made this up. Why would I have made this up?" “Why have you pretended to be Katie?”
“I was ashamed of who I’d been, of the part of me that didn’t want to save her. I only tried to live in the way we know Katie would have lived. It was an attempt to keep her goodness alive.”
Katie’s goodness was in fact what Robert had loved, then and now.
“Please forgive me for not telling you right away,” she said. “I couldn’t think of how.”
If she had told him the truth then, would that have changed the nature of the wild story she was telling now? He wasn’t sure which was the worse offense: withholding the truth or making up a fantastic lie.
His phone rang again on the heels of the first call.
“I think you’re Katie but don’t want to admit it,” he said. “I can’t guess why.”
“Considering I’ve been using her name for the last fifteen years, that doesn’t add up.”
“You look like Katie.”
“How much? Think about it, Robert. Hair is easy to duplicate. My eyes might be any color. My skin tone is damaged. I’m taller than Katie was. You see what you want to see.”
Robert turned around and studied her. He leaned against the windowsill and crossed his ankles and his arms. How closely had he looked into her face in the past several days? He’d made assumptions based on her hair, her speech, her gestures. His eyes had been trained on her heart.
She showed him the melted tattoo on her ankle. “I showed this to you the morning of the massacre,” she reminded him. “Janice has one like it. Except hers isn’t scarred.”
Robert ran a hand through his hair. There was so much he couldn’t explain. “Would you be willing to have a DNA test, compare your DNA to Janeal’s?”
She nodded. “Do you think she’d agree to it?”
A test would satisfy his first pressing need—to know whether these women were actually the same—but no science existed that could tell him whether his love was resilient enough to withstand the results. He needed time to process this bizarre claim and wished he had known it before suggesting he might stay here in New Mexico.
When Robert’s phone rang for the third time, he crossed the room and snatched it off the table. Harlan Woodman.
“Lukin.”
“Robert, we have a tip on Sanso. Someone spotted him up I-25 in Las Vegas, and local police confirmed a description of him at an urgent care center. They could use your expertise trailing him.”
“How long ago?”
“Couple hours.”
Robert hit a wall of fatigue. He was tired of chasing this man and didn’t care if he never heard the name Sanso again.
“Let me get on the road and I’ll call you back,” he said.
He tucked the phone into the holder on his belt and began to collect the few things he’d brought with him. Katie stayed attuned to the window, but she tipped an ear in the direction of Robert’s movements.
“I have to go up to Las Vegas. It’s what—a two-hour drive from here?”
Katie nodded.
“Will you be okay here by yourself?”
She turned her face at a slight angle to him then, and he saw that she was crying.
There was nothing he could do about it.
He walked to the entryway behind the sofa, stepped into the hall that led out to the front, and paused.
“If someone told me a week ago that I wasn’t the only survivor of that massacre, I would have given him a piece of my mind.”
Katie bowed her head.
“Now I’m standing here and there are three of us. And two of you. There’s a part of me that thinks I might be hallucinating. Maybe I made this all up after I arrested Sanso because putting him in jail wasn’t what I ever really wanted for all my efforts.
“Maybe I wanted something entirely impossible. A different outcome. Friends and lovers resurrected from the dead.”
He was about to leave behind a flesh-and-blood hope or a doomed wish.
He couldn’t be sure which one.