After a long, uncomfortable moment, he laughed dryly and shook his head. “God, I don’t even know where to start.”

  “How about where you’ve been for the last five months?” The question came out barbed and cold, and I didn’t take it back.

  “That’s…” Andrew met my gaze. “That’s the thing. It’s all a long, convoluted story.”

  I exhaled. “Look, it doesn’t need to be, okay? If you don’t want to be together, then just say so and get the hell out of here. I’m glad you’re not dead in a ditch somewhere, but I don’t think I want to know the rest.”

  He studied me for a moment, then flicked his eyes back to the folder. As his thumb played with the edge, he quietly said, “I didn’t want to leave.”

  “But you did.”

  “Yeah.” He nodded once. “I did. Just… I don’t know if it changes anything, but I didn’t want to.”

  “Then why did you?” I glanced at the folder. “And what is that about?”

  Andrew swallowed. “Yeah, that’s where it gets convoluted. So I guess the best place to start is at the beginning.”

  “Okay.” I waited, definitely not interested in my dinner and kind of regretting what little I’d eaten. Acid burned the back of my throat as I waited for my ex-boyfriend to tell me what the fuck was going on.

  “All right. So. For starters…” He looked at me through his lashes. “My name isn’t Andrew Keller.”

  I blinked. “Come again?”

  “My name isn’t—”

  “Yeah, I heard you.” I gave a sharp, bitter laugh. “What? Were you in witness protection or something?”

  He met my gaze.

  And he didn’t laugh.

  I glanced at the folder again. Then at him. “Wait—were you in witness protection?”

  Without breaking eye contact, he nodded. “Yeah. I was.”

  My lips parted. I stared at him, desperate for the punchline. He had to be getting ready to say Nah, just kidding. I was cheating on you.

  But he didn’t.

  Sitting back, he took a deep breath. “I wasn’t… It wasn’t supposed to happen the way it did.”

  My mouth had gone dry, but I was afraid to take a drink because I might get sick. “Why did it happen the way it did?”

  He kept his gaze down, still intently watching his thumb work at the corner of the folder. “The short version is that someone figured out where I was. Or, well, they figured out I was in witsec, and the marshals decided they needed to relocate me in case my identity and location had been compromised. They showed up at my door and told me we had to leave right now.” He pushed out a ragged breath and met my gaze again. “I wanted to call you. I didn’t want to leave that way. But they took my phone as soon as they showed up, and anyway, there was no time. I literally had time to pack a couple of suitcases, and the marshals sent someone in to grab everything else while they got me out of town.”

  I just stared, completely unable to process all this. Though I’d never had any direct experiences with it, I was generally familiar with how witness protection worked. Still, it was one thing to be aware of the process. This situation? Finding out my boyfriend had been part of the program all along, and that he’d been swept away by it without any warning? Whoa.

  Andrew opened the folder to the first page. He turned the whole thing around and pushed it toward me.

  Heart pounding, I took it.

  My eyes immediately went to the photo. It was Andrew the way he looked now—clean-cut with light hair—but he was wearing a uniform.

  A police uniform.

  My head snapped up. “You’re a cop?”

  He nodded slowly. “I’m a homicide detective in Valecroft, Indiana.” Then he winced, avoiding my gaze. “Or, well. I was.”

  I didn’t ask why he wasn’t anymore. I was curious, but there was still too much other information to process.

  I flicked my eyes back and forth from the uniformed photo in front of me to the casually dressed man in the other chair. Andrew was a manager at a credit union down by the lakefront. He wore khakis and golf shirts, and everyone loved his smile. How the hell was he a cop?

  I looked closer at the words beside the photo.

  Gaines, Brandon J.

  “Brandon,” I whispered. “That’s your real name.”

  “Yeah,” he said almost as quietly. “I can’t even tell you how many times I wanted you to know that.”

  I held his gaze. He held mine.

  So many feelings. So fucking many feelings. Should I have been relieved by all this? I felt like I should’ve been. Yes, he’d lied, but he’d been in witness protection. What choice did he have?

  But his name was Brandon.

  His fucking name was Brandon, and he was a homicide detective from somewhere in Indiana, and…

  I had no idea who this man was. We’d dated for the better part of three years. More than once, I’d seriously thought that we might be in for the long haul. We’d slept in his bed. We’d slept in my bed. We’d made out instead of watching movies. We’d spent perfectly boring evenings at his place or mine, watching stupid reruns and eating delivered pizza and bitching about our jobs. There’d been conversations about marriage. Getting a dog. Having kids, for God’s sake.

  I had been completely head over heels in love with Andrew Keller.

  But his name was Brandon.

  I closed the folder and pushed it back toward him. There was more behind that first page—a lot more, judging by the thickness—but I didn’t want to see it. I really, really didn’t want to know.

  “Seth, I’m sorry,” he whispered. “I can’t imagine what these last few months have been like, and I—”

  “It really doesn’t matter.” I looked him in the eyes and forced my expression and my voice to stay neutral even though this was killing me. “I get it. You didn’t ghost me. You were in witness protection.” I stood to take what remained of my sandwich to the counter so I could put it in the refrigerator. “We’re good.”

  “We… We are?” He sounded dubious.

  “Yeah. So, um. Take care, okay?”

  Silence. Then his chair ground on the floor, and his soft footsteps made me cringe. “Seth. Please. Can we—”

  “There’s nothing else we need to say,” I snapped, my stupid voice shaking because I couldn’t keep all these stupid feelings together. “I get it. You didn’t cheat or ghost me or whatever. And I’m glad you’re not dead.” I blinked until I was sure my eyes weren’t tearing up, and then I faced him. “But I don’t know you. So there’s really nothing left to talk about.”

  He stared at me, jaw slack. “Seth… Look, I’m sorry. I am. I came back because I love you, and I—”

  “Don’t,” I ground out. “You’ve said enough.”

  His mouth opened and closed like a fish’s before he finally shut it. His expression was stoic, but I could see the hurt in his eyes, and I fucking refused to let it win me over because I didn’t know who the hell he was.

  You’re a stranger. Your name is Brandon. Christ, you even look like a cop. How did I never figure out you were a cop?

  I shook myself. “We’re done, okay?”

  His Adam’s apple jumped, but he backed off a step. “Okay. Okay. I’ll, um… I’ll get out of here, then.” He collected the folder off the table, and I pretended not to notice the unsteadiness in his hands. Those perfect, talented hands that could be so rough or so gentle depending on—

  Stop. Just stop.

  “If you change your mind, or if you just want some answers…” He put a card on the table. “Call me.”

  And then he left the kitchen. I stayed stock still as I listened to him put on his shoes and leave. I listened to the car engine—not the car he usually drove—fade away.

  Once he was well and truly gone, I shakily picked up the weathered card.

  Detective Brandon Gaines.

  Valecroft Police Department.

  Homicide Division.

  Below that, the office and cell numbers were crossed out, and there was a handwritten phone number and an email address instead. On the back, a nearby motel and room number. Where he was staying, I assumed.

  I sagged against the counter and exhaled.

  Footsteps approached, and I cringed. Marcus poked his head into the kitchen. “Uh, everything okay?”

  I nodded, my tongue sticking to the roof of my mouth.

  His eyebrow arched. “You don’t look like everything’s okay.”

  My eyes stung, and I tried to be slick and swipe at them without making it obvious, but did I really expect to get anything past Marcus?

  With a sigh, he stepped closer and wrapped his arms around me. “I’m sorry.”

  I just exhaled and hugged him back, that damn business card still in my hand.

  So that was what closure felt like after Andrew.

  Well, this fucking sucks.

  Chapter 2

  Brandon

  Now what?

  Tapping my thumbs on the rental car’s wheel, I numbly drove the familiar streets of Coeur d’Alene toward the motel where I’d checked in earlier. I wasn’t sure what I’d expected tonight. How I’d thought Seth would react. I just knew I hadn’t anticipated him calmly telling me we were strangers and then kicking me out.

  Now that he had, well, could I blame him? I’d just told him that everything he’d ever known about me was a lie. Maybe I should’ve expected it.

  He was a cop. He had to understand how witness protection worked and why I hadn’t been able to breathe a word to anyone—not even the man I loved—about who I really was. Intellectually, the whole thing probably made perfect sense to him.

  But emotionally… I mean, seriously: could I blame the guy?

  I didn’t. I honestly didn’t. I wasn’t angry at him. It just fucking hurt. With every day that had passed since I’d left Idaho, I’d known my odds of being forgiven were growing slimmer. After five months had gone by, I’d had little hope he’d even be willing to speak to me or hear me out. Forgiveness was a hell of a long shot.

  And now…

  Well, now I knew.

  So…

  Now what?

  I kept circling back to that question just like I kept circling familiar streets and neighborhoods. This had been home at one time. The man I’d been for the past five years had made a life here. I had people. Friends. Coworkers. Favorite restaurants and coffee shops. I’d learned all those intricate details that came with settling into a place—the shortcuts and back roads, what times to avoid certain places because of traffic, where not to eat on Sunday mornings unless you wanted to wait out the church crowd. I knew that one hill where the cops liked to lurk and bust people speeding, including Officer “I don’t care if you’re dating one of my colleagues—the speed limit is thirty-five.” Hey, it was worth a try.

  I hadn’t given much of it any thought before tonight. It was all stuff that populated a mental map and didn’t really warrant much conscious thought until something changed, like when that one diner had burned down or when one of my favorite back roads was closed for construction. None of it had really seemed important on any emotional or sentimental level.

  Tonight, I was grabbing hold of every familiar fragment of my past life and clinging to it. Earlier, before Seth’s shift had ended, I’d probably gotten some weird looks while I’d snapped photos of seemingly random things on my phone. No one blinked while I’d loaded up my phone with shots of the Lake Coeur d’Alene waterfront like a tourist, but I didn’t imagine people usually took pictures of that one bookstore on West Sunset or the sandwich shop on Appleway. If anyone had asked, I’d have said it was for an art project or a travel blog or something. So much easier to explain than the truth, which was that I felt untethered and needed to remember the details of the place I’d spent half a decade in a stranger’s shoes. As if the photos would reassure me that these places had existed. That I had existed. That my first date with Seth really had happened at that coffee shop, and that the best French dip sandwich I’d ever tasted had come from that restaurant over there.

  All I had left of this place were the landmarks. The buildings. The signs. The streets. Some of them were gone now, too. In the months since I’d left, my favorite Italian place had shut down, and that vintage clothing shop was now a tax prep service. It shouldn’t have hit me in the feels, seeing those buildings with different names on them, but it was like another piece of my past blinking out of existence.

  Those seemingly small losses were heavier now as my conversation with Seth rang in my ears. He hadn’t changed since I’d been gone, but I had. I was someone else now. No longer Andrew Keller. On paper, I was Brandon Gaines again. In practice, I wasn’t sure who I was.

  Tonight, who I really was didn’t matter quite as much, because Seth had made it very clear who I wasn’t: his boyfriend, or even his friend.

  Our relationship was over. The man I’d thought I would marry was in the past along with everyone else who’d ever known Andrew Keller.

  In theory, there was only one thing left to do—go back to Valecroft and try to pick up the pieces of the life I’d left behind half a decade ago. Except Valecroft—hell, everything back home that had once been familiar—was miles and miles of faded memories. A lot of the signs and buildings looked the same, but enough had changed that it was like I’d stepped into a parallel universe where my hometown was just different enough to leave me unbalanced. If it was possible for a city to be in the uncanny valley, that was what Valecroft was to me now—almost right, but just wrong enough to feel like something out of a nightmare.

  And that was to say nothing about the people. I knew their names and faces, but a lot of living happened in five years. Marriages, divorces, babies, relocations, deaths. I could catch up on all of that eventually, I supposed, but I’d left a lot of complicated emotions in the people I loved. It was impossible to literally fake my own death and then stroll back into people’s lives without things getting messy, and even those who’d welcomed me back with open arms at first had still kept me at arm’s length.

  I couldn’t stay in Coeur d’Alene. I didn’t feel settled in Valecroft. So where the hell was I supposed to go now?

  Going back into witsec was an option. My witness inspector—my handler, basically—had encouraged me to stay in and had warned me against leaving, since there was always that risk, however small, that someone still had it out for me. If I changed my mind, the witsec door was still open, at least for a while.

  I had options, but I couldn’t go home. Home didn’t exist.

  And now I had confirmation of what I’d been bracing for all the way to Coeur d’Alene—that my relationship with Seth was, like everyone and everything else, in the past.

  Exhaustion was starting to set in, and my emotions were a mess. I really shouldn’t have been driving like this, so I headed back to my room. As much as I wanted to hit the road and get the hell out of here, I needed to at least try to sleep. Falling asleep at the wheel didn’t actually sound that bad except for the part where I might take somebody else out with me. Self-preservation was long gone, but the desire not to hurt anyone but myself kept me alert and between the lines all the way back to the motel.

  After I’d keyed myself into the depressingly bland room, I sat on the bed beside my suitcase and stared at the pastel-colored wall. Without the road to hold my attention, my mind was a jumble of thoughts and worries, and I didn’t have answers for any of it. I really had no idea what to do now. What to feel. What to think. Despite telling myself all the way here what the outcome would probably be, I hadn’t even realized how much hope I’d been hanging on the possibility of reconnecting with Seth until that possibility evaporated. Until he’d looked at me like a stranger and asked me to leave.

  So, yeah. Now what?

  I thumbed through the photos I’d taken today, choking up at the sight of things like buildings and billboards. The lake was full of memories that were bittersweet now, like that time Seth and I had rented a boat to go fishing, and we’d spent more time focused on each other than anything in the water. Or when I’d taken Seth to the credit union’s annual barbecue, and we’d ended up in the emergency room for a few hours after he turned his ankle playing volleyball. Today I’d snapped a picture of one of the volleyball courts in that particular park, and it was heartbreaking to look at it now because it was completely deserted.

  I kept going back in time through my photo album, into the hundreds of pictures I’d taken as Andrew Keller.

  At least I had my phone this time. Had I taken the marshals up on the offer of another new identity, then they’d have kept it like they did the first time around, along with my laptop and everything else. It was too dangerous to hold on to anything attached to my old life—anything that could identify me as that person. They’d held on to this one while I was in temporary hiding after they grabbed me from Coeur d’Alene, but they’d returned it after I’d told them I was leaving the program.

  Thank God, because it was my only source of photos of Seth, not to mention our old texts. Those were the only connection to him that I had left. I’d backed up most of them on my laptop and two external drives, plus cloud storage, to make absolutely sure that I never, ever lost them, but not all. I’d gotten lazy about it because after so much time had gone by, I hadn’t expected to get yanked out of that life. Now those photos were all that remained of my life as Andrew Keller.

  Of my relationship with Seth.

  Scrolling through the photos, I didn’t even bother fighting back tears. I’d cried the last few times I’d looked at them. Wasn’t surprising at all that I was crying now.

  It was like looking at photos of someone who’d died. Someone I’d never, ever see again.

  Except I wasn’t sure which of us had metaphorically died—Seth or me. Seth was no longer a part of my life, but the man I was in those images? He was gone too. I’d only been him for a relatively short while, but that was the man who’d found the courage to ask that cute cop out for coffee. The man who’d thought he’d blown it on that first date because he’d been such a nervous, stammering mess, but had been halfway back to his car when he’d gotten the text that said, Let’s do this again soon.