The Fidelity Files (Jennifer Hunter #1)(138)

"ASHLYN," ANNE said impersonally as she opened the door. It sounded more like an obvious statement of my existence than an actual greeting. I followed her into the living room and she motioned toward the same seat I had occupied under completely different circumstances less than two months earlier. When this all started. When Raymond Jacobs's spies were outside taking down my license plate.

I sat down and glanced around me. The room was, of course, familiar. And for the most part everything looked the same. Some of the plants were facing opposite directions to maximize or minimize sun exposure, the framed artwork had clearly been moved from wall to wall in search of a happier ambience, but it was, all in all, the same living room. The same house. And the woman sitting in the all-too-memorable seat across from me on the couch was the same woman I had spoken with only a short time ago.

But in sitting there, across from her granite face that revealed nothing, it certainly didn't feel the same.

And it wasn't just the obvious shift of power: Me now sitting in the figurative seat she had once occupied, asking her for help, pleading for her compassion... instead of the other way around.

There was a void in the room. An emptiness that was palpable.

That's when I noticed the photographs on the table.

The same photographs that I'm sure I once tried desperately to ignore, because they said too much. Because they divulged details that I didn't want to know, details that I didn't need to know.

A month ago the framed pictures showed five people. Five seemingly happy faces. Now there were only four. Anne and her three sons – who all appeared to be under the age of ten. It was as if someone had taken a plain, old-fashioned rubber eraser and painfully eliminated one particular face, wiping out all evidence of him.

That's also when I noticed the empty ring finger on Anne's left hand.

If I had tried to ignore it up until now, there was no use trying anymore.

It was the answer I never wanted to know – to the question I never dared ask. And now it was staring me straight in the face, refusing to be ignored.

I remembered when I was in grade school and my teachers always required that we write in pencil. We were never allowed to use a pen. Because it wasn't erasable. It wasn't fixable. If you made a mistake in pen, misspelled a word, accidentally wrote a backward R, you had to scratch it out, leaving behind a messy and very unsightly blob of black ink on your page. Proof. Evidence that you had erred. And everyone would know – everyone would see it.

Pencil, on the other hand, was so impermanent. So, changeable...so forgiving. Or at least that's what they told us. You make a mistake, you erase, and you rewrite, and no one knows the difference. No one sees the ink stain. Your steps are essentially untraceable.

But that argument never seemed to make a whole lot of sense to me. Because as I soon came to notice, sitting at my wooden desk, frantically trying to purge my errors with my brick-shaped Pearl eraser, they never completely vanished. No matter how hard I tried to rub out that flawed lettering, that misused word, that backward R, no matter how furiously I ran that rubber eraser back and forth across my page, leaving behind mountains of pink, confetti-like dust, the mistake never fully disappeared. I could always see traces of it.

It was always there.

Peeking out from behind the forward-facing R's and the replaced words.

And even at such a young age, all I could think was, At least the unsightly pen blotch was honest.

Sitting in the former Mrs. Jacobs's living room that day, I saw the traces. The ones the magic eraser just couldn't seem to fully remove. They were there, in the faces of her three children, in the rotated ficus plants, in the rearrangement of the art on her walls – and especially in the lightness of her left hand, the one that not so long ago had borne a ring of diamonds so heavy that sometimes her fingers cramped at the end of the day – but she never complained.

In that moment I understood why I never stayed in contact with any of my clients. It was self-preservation. Because the weight of all those diamonds, all those photographs, all those faces – somehow, in the process, I unconsciously transferred it over to myself. And it was far too heavy for me to bear.

Even if reasonable logic told me I had no responsibility for these outcomes, and even if I knew that I had once offered this woman a gift that many women never have the opportunity to receive, as I looked into Anne's eyes I knew I wasn't the right person to blame, but for her, I certainly was the easiest. And I would continue to be for the next several years... maybe more.

"What was it that you needed to talk to me about?" Her question was polite but unfeeling.

I did my best to ignore her cold demeanor and accusing stare. This woman was the only person I knew who could help me. I had to at least ask.

I reached down and opened the black leather briefcase I had brought with me and removed my laptop. I turned it on and waited as it awakened from hibernation.

"I take it you remember what my occupation is." I smiled warmly.

She nodded. "If memory serves."

But as I launched a new Web browser on my laptop and navigated to the last page viewed, I had to wonder if I even knew what my occupation was. Part of me wanted to continue doing exactly what I had been doing. Reinitiate my quest. Pick up exactly where I had left off and pretend that I never left. Encountering someone like Jamie Richards was certainly enough to make it feel like more than just a viable option. And the less-than-subtle, very personal reminder that those types of men are still out there made me want to continue my fight against them even more.