Four months. Four months had gone by.
Abbey awakened in the soft bed and reached out, but Jason wasn’t there. The sheet was cold. He’d been gone for a while.
She got out of bed and slipped on a robe. There was still a half-full mug of coffee on the worktable near the window, but that was a leftover from the middle of the night. Her laptop was open, and the table was filled with yellow pads covered over in Peter Chancellor’s spidery handwriting. That was his rhythm, to work in longhand—in pencil!—and to take volumes of notes and ideas, outlining every chapter, every thread of the story, every character. And then they would talk it over, and Abbey would take over in the late evening hours, turning the notes into prose until it was nearly three in the morning. They’d been working that way since Abbey and Jason had arrived at the Pennsylvania house.
Now nearly half the book was done. The story that could only be told as fiction. Pyramid!
The upcoming novel by Peter Chancellor and Abbey Laurent.
Was it fact or fiction? That was up to the reader to decide. The only reality that had made it to the headlines was that Varak was dead and his institute had been shut down. There had been no mention of Walden Thatcher, who was still missing. Nor of the Pyramid. Nor of Lennon.
Abbey went to the window and opened it, letting in the fall air, which was cool and sweet. The view looked out across miles of national forest. A hawk made circles in the sky, going in and out of the dazzling sun. Below her, where the backyard of the Chancellor estate sprawled across the high ground, she saw Jason staring out over green hilltops that rolled toward the horizon. He had his hands in his pockets, and the breeze rustled his brown hair. But the white gauze pad on the side of his head was still visible, where Lennon’s bullet had penetrated his skull. Nearly killing him, but not killing him.
That was the way it had happened once before, in the waters off Marseilles, when he’d been shot and lost his past. When everything had been erased. The question for both of them now was, how much would he remember this time?
Jason had awakened after two weeks in the hospital and not known her. For another two weeks after that, she’d been a stranger to him. He’d remembered nothing, not of what had happened at Varak’s estate, not of his life for the past several years. Not of Treadstone, or Nova, or the things he’d done. Not of meeting Abbey and falling in love with her. He was once again a man with no identity, wrestling with who he was.
And then slowly, oh, so slowly, memories had started to come back.
She hadn’t told him her name. She wanted him to remember it on his own. And a month after he’d nearly died to save her life, his eyes fluttered open in a New York hospital, and he’d said the word that nearly made her heart leave her chest.
“Abbey.”
They’d gone to Peter Chancellor’s estate not long after that. Ever since, day by day and week by week, more pieces in the puzzle had begun to take shape in his mind. There was a little bit more whenever he awakened. Jason rested and remembered, and Abbey sat with Peter Chancellor and wrote.
She never wanted it to end.
“Good morning.”
Abbey turned around and saw Peter’s wife, Alison MacAndrew, standing in the doorway of the bedroom. She had fresh coffee and a freshly baked scone on a silver tray. They’d become close in the months that Abbey had been here. She’d learned that the reserve this beautiful woman used with other people was a defense mechanism, not dissimilar to her own. Partly to protect herself. Partly to protect her husband. It was also obvious that Alison loved Peter Chancellor as much as the writer loved her.
Alison joined her at the window. She followed Abbey’s stare to Jason, who was still absorbed in the hills.
“We both have men who would do anything for us,” Alison said. “That’s a rare gift. But sometimes those men also need us to rescue them.”
“I don’t think Jason needs anyone,” Abbey murmured.
Alison gave a sparkling laugh. “Oh, you couldn’t be more wrong about that. You don’t see how he watches you when you’re not looking.”
Abbey smiled and felt warm at that thought.
Then Alison’s face turned serious. “He remembered something this morning.”
“What?” Abbey looked at her with concern. “How do you know?”
“He told me as he was going out.”
“Did he say what it was?”
“No, but there was a darkness about him. That was new.”
“I need to go,” Abbey said, feeling an urgency to be with him.
“Yes, of course.”
Alison left the bedroom, and Abbey rushed to get dressed. She drank coffee, she took a bite of the scone, and she checked through the window to see that Jason hadn’t moved. She hurried downstairs, slipped a light jacket over shoulders, and then walked out into the cool air. She crossed through the wet grass and came up beside Jason. He didn’t react as she joined him, but she saw that Alison was right.
There was something in his face. Something she didn’t like. Darkness. Memory.
They didn’t talk, not at first. She slipped a hand through his as they stared at the mountains, and she held on tightly.
Finally, she asked, “Are you okay?”
“Yes.”
His eyes narrowed. He was staring far off into the hills, but Abbey didn’t know what he was seeing.
“Is anything wrong?” she asked.
Jason didn’t answer that question. Instead, he said, as if he were seeing it in his head for the first time, “I walked away from you that night in Quebec City.”
“Yes, you did.”
“That was a mistake. I was wrong to do that, Abbey.”
“I know.”
“I was trying to protect you. I still am.”
“I’d rather be at risk than not have you with me,” Abbey said. “Don’t ever walk away from me again.”
Jason turned and stared at her. “You may regret that. We both might. The rule says to never get involved.”
“I don’t care about rules,” Abbey replied.
He was silent as he turned back to the hills. The hawk continued to soar in circles, hunting for prey hiding in the green fields.
“Alison said you remembered something,” she went on.
Still silent, Jason nodded.
“Tell me,” Abbey said. “What is it? Is it something about us?”
“I already remember everything about us. Every single second. No, this is new. This is from the past. From before.”
The wind blew, and Abbey shivered, feeling a chill. Her face turned dark, like his. “Jason?”
He slid a hand into the pocket of his jacket and came out with his gun, which he rubbed between his fingers, checking it, arming it, disarming it. It didn’t matter where they were, or how safe they were, or whether it was day or night. The gun was always with him. Danger was always with him. She was going to have to live with that.
“Jason?” she said again. “What did you remember?”
Bourne aimed his gun at the hills, as if strangers were always watching them.
“Things they wanted me to forget,” he said.