she had, it seemed, sacrificed the truest love I’d ever known in order to save our lives. But that knowledge and its accompanying utter helplessness tore a hole straight through my heart. The pain was back—different maybe, but even more potent.
How to lessen that pain? Yep, you guessed it. Benedict and I hit the Library Bar. We didn’t pretend the arms of a stranger would help this time. We knew that only friends like Jack Daniel’s and Ketel One could blot out or at least blur images this searing.
We were pretty deep into our Jack-Ketel friendship when I asked one simple question. “Why can’t I be with her?”
Benedict didn’t reply. He was suddenly fascinated by something at the bottom of his drink. He hoped that I’d let it go. I didn’t.
“Why can’t I vanish too and live alone with her?”
“Because,” he said.
“Because?” I repeated. “What are you, five years old?”
“You’d be willing to do that, Jake? Give up teaching, your life here, all of it?”
“Yes.” There was no hesitation. “Of course I would.”
Benedict stared back down at his drink. “Yeah, I get that,” he said in the saddest voice.
“So?” I said.
Benedict closed his eyes. “Sorry. You can’t.”
“Why not?”
“Two reasons,” he said. “One, it isn’t done. That’s just part of our protocol, part of how we compartmentalize. It’s too dangerous.”
“But I could do it,” I said, hearing the pleading in my voice coming right through the slur. “It’s been six years. I say I’m moving overseas or—”
“You’re talking too loudly.”
“Sorry.”
“Jake?”
“Yes?”
He met my eye and held it. “This is the last time we talk about this. Any of this. I know how hard it is, but you have to promise me you won’t raise it again. Do you understand?”
I didn’t reply directly. “You said there were two reasons I couldn’t be with her.”
“Right.”
“What’s the second?”
He dropped his eyes and finished his drink in one enormous gulp. He held the liquor in his mouth and signaled to the bartender for another. The bartender frowned. We had been keeping him busy.
“Benedict?”
He lifted his glass, tried to drain out the last drops. Then he said, “No one knows where Natalie is.”
I made a face. “I get that there’s secrecy—”
“Not just secrecy.” He kept an impatient eye toward the bartender now. “No one knows where she is.”
“Come on. Someone must.”
He shook his head. “That’s part of it. That’s our saving grace. That’s what’s keeping our people alive right now. Or so I hope. Todd was tortured. You know that, right? He could give up certain things—the retreat in Vermont, some members—but not even he knows where they go after they get their”—he made quote marks in the air—“‘fresh start.’”
“But they know who you are.”
“Only Malcolm does. I was the exception because I came from overseas. The rest? Fresh Start set them up. They are given all the tools. Then, for everyone’s safety, they go out on their own and tell no one where they end up. That’s what I mean by compartmentalizing. We all know just enough—and not any more than that.”
Nobody knew where Natalie was. I tried to let that sink in. It wouldn’t. Natalie was in danger, and I could do nothing about it. Natalie was out there alone, and I couldn’t be with her.
Benedict shut down then. He had explained as much as he ever would. I knew that now. As we left the bar and staggered back to the house, I made my own promise of sorts. I would back off. I would let it go. I could deal with this pain—I had dealt with it in other forms for six years—in exchange for the safety of the woman I loved.
I could live without Natalie, but I couldn’t live if I did something that would put her in danger. I had been warned repeatedly. Now it was time to listen.
I was out of it.
That was what I told myself as I stumbled into the guest cottage. That was what I planned to do as my head hit the pillow and I closed my eyes. That was what I believed when I flipped onto my back and watched the ceiling spin from too much drink. That was what I was sure was the truth up until—according the bedside digital alarm clock—6:18 A.M., when I remembered something that had almost escaped my mind:
Natalie’s father.
I sat up in bed, my entire body suddenly rigid.
I still didn’t know what happened to Professor Aaron Kleiner.
There was, I supposed, the off chance that Julie Pottham was right, that her father ran off with a student and then remarried, but if that was the case, Shanta would have found him with no problem. No, he had vanished.
Just like his daughter Natalie would some twenty years later.
Perhaps there was a simple explanation. Perhaps Fresh Start had helped him too. But, no, Fresh Start had been created twenty years ago. Could Professor Kleiner’s disappearance have been the organization’s precursor? Malcolm Hume knew Natalie’s father. In fact, Natalie’s mother had come to him when Aaron Kleiner first abandoned the family. So maybe my mentor helped him vanish and then, what, years later, formed a group under the guise of a charity to help others like him?
Maybe.
Except twenty years later, his daughter suddenly had to vanish too? Does that make sense?
It didn’t.
And why would the NYPD have shown me a surveillance photograph from six years ago? How could that relate to Natalie’s father? What about Danny Zuker and Otto Devereaux? How could whatever was going on now, with Natalie, be related to her father who vanished twenty-five years ago?
Good questions.
I got out of bed and debated my next move. But what next move? I had promised Benedict that I would stay out of this. Moreover, I now understood in a very real, very concrete way the dangers of continuing this quest, not only for me but for the woman I loved. Natalie had chosen to vanish. Whether it was to protect herself or me or both, I had to not only respect her wishes but her judgment. She had scrutinized her predicament with more knowledge than I had, weighed the pros and cons, and decided that she had to disappear.
Who was I to mess that up?
So once again, I was about to let it go, was about to surrender to living with this horrible albeit necessary frustration, when another thought struck me so hard I almost stumbled. I stayed perfectly still, mulling it over in my mind, looking at it from every conceivable angle. Yes, it was there—something we had all overlooked. Something that changed the very nature of what Benedict had convinced me to do.
Benedict was heading to class when I sprinted outside. When he saw the look on my face, he froze too. “What’s wrong?”
“I can’t let it go.”
He sighed. “We went over this.”
“I know,” I said, “but we were missing something.”
His eyes moved from side to side as though he were afraid someone nearby might be eavesdropping. “Jake, you promised—”
“It didn’t start with me.”
“What?”
“This new danger. The NYPD asking questions. Otto Devereaux and Danny Zuker. Fresh Start under siege. It
