Sleepwalker (Nightwatcher #2)(26)

Funny. In another lifetime—the one that came to a crashing halt more than a decade ago—it was just the opposite. Mack had more than his share of solitude and often craved human companionship. He was far lonelier during his first marriage than he’d ever been in his single life.

Carrie was not, as he felt obliged to apologetically explain to his family and friends, a “people person.” She wanted—needed—no one but Mack.

As a red-blooded man with a nurturing soul, he was touched—all right, flattered—by the fact that a fiercely independent woman like Carrie Robinson had chosen to let him into her life.

It was obvious to him from the moment they met that she kept the rest of the world at bay. At the time, he had no idea why. He only knew that, as a man, he was as drawn to Carrie as he had been to stray puppies and kittens as a boy, and to the emotionally bruised children he met through his volunteer work with the Big Brother organization in his early twenties.

He wanted to take her in, look after her, make up for the pain she had endured.

The pain . . .

Sometimes he still thinks about that—about Carrie’s past. He thinks about it, and he wonders, God forgive him, if the things she told him were even true.

He managed to keep her secret to himself for the duration of their marriage. But at the very end, when he realized she’d been lost in the burning rubble downtown, his willpower cracked. He told his best friend, Ben, the truth about Carrie.

A few years ago, over a couple of beers, Ben confessed that he had in turn confided Carrie’s secret to his wife—and that Randi hadn’t bought it.

“What do you mean?” Mack was taken aback, not that Ben hadn’t kept the confidence, but that he—rather, Randi—would question the integrity in what Mack had revealed.

Ben took a deep breath. “Look, this has been bothering me for a long time, and I’ve wanted to say something to you, but it always seemed too soon. Now you have Allison and the girls and you’ve moved on and I guess it doesn’t seem to matter as much . . .”

“What are you trying to say, Ben?”

“When I mentioned to Randi that you’d told me that Carrie spent her childhood in the witness protection program, she basically said that was bullshit.”

“What, she actually thought I’d lie to you about something like that?”

“No.”

“What?” Then, reading the expression on Ben’s face, he suddenly got it. “Oh.”

Randi—and apparently Ben, too—had concluded that Carrie had lied about it—to Mack.

“You’ve got to admit, it sounded far-fetched,” Ben said, and hastily added, “But I’m not saying it wasn’t true.”

Maybe not—but suddenly, he had Mack thinking it.

I guess it doesn’t seem to matter as much, Ben had said.

He was dead wrong.

For some reason, it does matter to Mack. It matters that he’ll never know the truth about Carrie’s past, if that wasn’t it.

It’s not as though he can go back and look into a trail that’s gone cold, because there never was a trail in the first place. The few details Carrie had provided were murky. She had said—or had she implied, or had he just assumed?—that there was a mob connection; that her father had seen or said or done something he shouldn’t have. If Carrie knew what that had been, she wasn’t willing to elaborate.

And if she knew what her real name had been, or where she’d lived before her family was swept into oblivion, she wasn’t sharing that, either. Not even with her husband. She simply told him that she was so young when it happened that she didn’t remember who she or her parents had once been.

“I never asked,” she said in response to Mack’s gentle probing for the details. “What did it matter? All I knew was that I had a normal, familiar life, and then one day, I didn’t.”

Yeah. That happens. Mack certainly gets it now, if he didn’t back then.

He just wishes he had pressed Carrie for more information. But at the time, he was so relieved that there was a logical—relatively speaking—explanation for her impenetrable walls that it never occurred to him she might have made up the whole story.

Even now, all these years later . . .

Most of the time, he believes what Carrie told him.

But once in a while, ever since Ben planted the seed of doubt, he wonders. That’s all. He’s just curious. It doesn’t make a difference in his life today one way or another.

“If it bothers you that much,” Allison said when he told her about Ben’s comment and its lingering effect, “then maybe you should see what you can find out. You know—try to trace her path before you met her.”

“It doesn’t bother me that much. Anyway, Carrie’s parents died years ago,” he pointed out, “and she had no one else.”

“No one else that she was aware of. Or . . . that you were aware of. You never know . . . she might have had a whole family someplace, wondering what ever happened to her. Maybe they deserve to know.”

“Maybe they’re better off if they don’t,” he pointed out darkly, and that was that.

Now, lying here in the dark thinking about it all again, he finds himself wondering how he would even go about it if he wanted to find out who Carrie really was.

It’s not like he can just call up the government office in charge of the witness protection program and ask them to come clean. That’s the whole point: the people who go into the program disappear forever. Carrie and her parents had, in effect, died the day they disappeared from their old lives, and they were reborn on the day they resurfaced under their new identities.