It makes it even more personal. I don’t need the Bureau to protect me anymore. I don’t need them to guide me. When I work on cases with them, I am doing just that. Working for them. It doesn’t feel like it’s about me anymore. I just have to decide if that’s enough for me.
Chapter Two
I'm almost to the bottom of the stack of mail when I get to a thicker envelope. The rest of the mail slips from my fingers when I see the return address.
“What's wrong?” Sam frowns. “What is that?”
“It's from the probate attorney,” I tell him.
Greg's murder was an incredible shock, but the aftermath threw me for even more of a loop. The days and weeks following the discovery of his body on the bloody sand were a blur of investigations and questions, trying to understand how it could possibly have happened.
He wasn't supposed to leave the hospital by himself. The incredible danger he was facing the entire time he was in the hospital was known to every person who worked in his ward. Even after Jonah and Anson were arrested, we knew that danger was still there and still had his floor on heightened security. It was going to get worse when he was released and didn't have the security and locked doors to keep him safe.
That's why he was supposed to wait. As soon as it came time for him to be discharged, it was arranged for me to pick him up at the hospital and escort him to his welcome home party and then to the secure location where he would continue his recovery. It was all planned out. The Bureau had arranged for a safe house, and he would be monitored and protected as long as it was necessary. But for some reason, he left. For some reason, he didn't wait.
When he walked out of the hospital, it was with only a blonde woman, no one recognized and who still had no name or connection. Days went by, and we still couldn't untangle this newest knot. And the realities of his death settled in.
It wasn't just coping with the reality that he was murdered. It wasn't just having to completely adjust a thought process that had already been altered long after I thought I might never see Greg again. He broke things off with me out of nowhere. Then he disappeared in an instant, and no one knew what happened to him. Then he appeared again, beaten, and brutalized, and my world became one that included him again. Not in the way it used to. It would never include him in that way again. But he was there. He was alive, and he held secrets and information critical to me being able to understand my uncle and the vicious way he destroyed my family.
Then just as quickly, he was gone once more. Only this time, it was permanent. There was nothing abstract about it now. When he went missing, I never truly let myself believe he was gone. I never talked about him in the past tense or thought about how he might have died. It's not that I had any sort of intuition, or I heard his voice at night or anything. It just never felt right to think of him as being dead when I couldn't think that way about my father after his own disappearance. There were enough people in my life who were truly gone. I could never again think of my mother as possibly being alive somewhere, and I couldn't bring myself to disrespect that by putting Greg or my father in that place.
Now I know the answer to both of those mysteries. I know my father is back in the house where he was living before he disappeared, re-assimilating himself to a more normal daily life.
And Greg is dead.
Less than two weeks after the discovery of his body, a lawyer contacted me. Jeffrey Grammer was his name. He was the last person I expected to hear from, and the news he offered me was so shocking, so unexpected it took a few days to even fully process it: Greg had no family. None that he was close enough to for an ongoing relationship, anyway. There might have been relatives scattered around, the kind with shared blood but not shared thought. According to Mr. Grammer, who came to my house and sat at the very edge of the couch like he wanted to be able to get up and run at any second, that was the reason Greg made the decision he did.
Mr. Grammer was the executor of Greg's will. It was surreal enough to hear those words. Of course, I knew Greg had a will. That was the kind of person he was. Like my parents. Like me. Making a will is the cautious, responsible thing to do when you work in this field. It was perfectly on-brand for Greg.
But that didn't make it any easier to hear the lawyer talk about it. Hearing that was so final. More final, even, than viewing Greg's body. I could reduce his body to nothing but an object, another detail of a crime scene, just like I do with every other crime I investigate. I could make myself look past the scar on his arm that I knew came from a car accident when he was a teenager. I could make myself look past the tattoo on his thigh most people didn't know about that commemorated his father's death in the military. I could even look past the lingering signs of injuries he sustained when
