entrance. She was surprised he would have done it with such force, though, since the wooden panes were broken and the glass shattered as if it had exploded.
She sucked in a breath of fear. But she smelled no telltale odor of gas or smoke. The glass may have exploded, but a bomb had not.
Could a gunshot have broken the window?
If so, her neighbors would have called the police. There would have been officers at her home, crime scene tape blocking it off from the street. But there was nothing but a light breeze blowing through her broken window and rattling the blind inside.
The blind was broken, like the panes and the glass. Had Brendan slammed his fist through it? Or had someone else?
Gathering all her courage, she opened that door and stepped inside the small back porch. Glass crunched beneath her feet, crushed between the soles of her shoes and the slate floor. As she passed the washer and dryer on her way to the kitchen, she noticed a brick and crumpled paper sitting atop the washer.
Someone had thrown a brick through her window?
Brendan?
Or was he the one who’d found it and picked it up? She suspected the latter, since there had obviously been a note secured to the brick with a rubber band. The broken band lay beside the brick and the crumpled paper.
She picked up the note and shivered with fear as she read the words: You should have been the one who died.
Oh, God. She was too late. Brendan had walked into a trap meant for her.
The scream startled Brendan, chilling his blood. He’d lost all sense of time and place. How long ago had he left Josie and their son? Had someone found them?
He’d left them alone and defenseless but for the gun he’d given Josie. Had she even had any bullets left?
He reached for the weapon at his back, pulling the gun from under his jacket. Then he crept up the stairs from the room he’d found in the basement, the one that had answered all the questions he’d had about ever trusting Josie Jessup.
The old steps creaked beneath his weight, giving away his presence. A shadow stood at the top of the stairwell, blocking Brendan’s escape. The dim bulb swinging overhead glinted off the metal of the gun the shadow held, the barrel pointed at Brendan. He lifted his gun and aimed. But then he noticed the hair and the figure. “Josie!”
“Brendan? You’re alive!” She launched herself at him, nearly knocking him off the stairs. “I thought you were dead!”
He caught himself against the brick wall at his back. “Now you know how it feels,” he murmured. Despite his bitterness, his arms closed around her, holding her against him.
Her heart pounded madly. “I was so worried about you. You didn’t come back to the car and then I found that note.”
“You thought that note referred to me?”
She nodded.
“As you can see, I’m alive,” he said. “So who does it refer to?”
She gasped as that guilt flashed across her face again.
And he remembered the sign. “Michael?”
“Yes,” she miserably replied. “Some people blame me for his death.”
“Did you kill him?”
She gasped again in shock and outrage. “No. I would never …”
“It’s not a good feeling to have people thinking you’re a killer,” he remarked.
Her brow furrowed with confusion as he set her away from him. “Where have you been all this time?” she asked. As he turned and headed back down the steps, she followed him. “You’ve been down here?” Then as she realized exactly where he’d been, she ran ahead of him and tried blocking the doorway to her den.
Bookshelves lined knotty pine walls. But it wasn’t there he’d found what he’d spent the past four years looking for.
“You broke into my filing cabinet!” she said.
He could have lied and blamed it on whoever had thrown the brick through her window. But that person would have had no interest in what he’d discovered. So he just shrugged.
“You had no right!” she said, as she hurried over to where he’d spread the files across her desk.
“I think I have more right to those records than you do,” he pointed out. “They’re all about me.”
She trembled as she shoved the papers back into folders. “But you shouldn’t have seen them.”
“That’s what you were working on when we were together,” he said, his gut aching as it had when he’d found the folders. If the drawer hadn’t been locked, he probably wouldn’t have bothered to jimmy it open. But he’d wanted to know all her secrets so that he might figure out who was trying to kill her. “You thought I killed my own father? That’s the story you were after when you came after me.”
She released a shuddery sigh. “That was a lifetime ago.”
“But you’re still a reporter.”
She shook her head. “No.”
“You teach journalism,” he said, gesturing toward a framed award that sat among the books on the shelves of the den. She had given up so much of her old life, except for that. No matter where she was or what she was calling herself, she was still a journalist.
“I teach,” she said, her tone rueful, “because I can’t do.”
“Because you can’t give it up.” Not for him. Not even for their son.
“I had to give up everything,” she said. “My home. My family.”
Family.
“Where’s CJ?” he asked, glancing around the shadows. She’d been alone on the stairs. Where had she stashed their child this time?
“He’s at his sitter’s,” she said. “He’s safe.”
“Are you sure?” He never should have let the boy out of his sight.
“I can trust the people here.”
Skeptical, he snorted. “She wouldn’t have thrown the brick?”
“Absolutely not,” she said. “It must have been one of my other students. Or one of Michael’s friends.”
“What happened to Michael?”
Sadness dimmed her eyes and filled them with tears. “He was killed pursuing a story.”
He
