“No, you don’t want me to do it again?”
“No - I - I mean, you didn’t - I don’t want you to not do it again.” She laughed then, realizing the absurdity of her wording. “I don’t think that made any sense.” She couldn’t believe how this man could make her feel so nervous while at the same time making her feel safer and more protected than she’d felt in a long time.
Garrett took her hand in his and rested both their hands on his knee. “I understood.”
***
“Aren’t these s’mores the best?” Orly asked, coming up beside Reese with a fresh marshmallow impaled on a stick.
Reese stood in front of the fire, watching the flames singe the marshmallow at the end of her stick. Meeting all of Garrett’s friends had gone better than she thought. They were all nice, and welcomed her with smiles and kind words. A few asked about her kidnapping ordeal, but Garrett warned them to leave it be, for which she was grateful. She just wasn’t ready to rehash everything yet.
“Yes, and I have the worst sweet tooth,” Reese admitted, remembering how Garrett had brought her an entire plate of them and she’d polished them off in less than a day. “I think it’s also gotten worse with age.”
Orly smiled and spun her stick around ensuring her entire marshmallow was engulfed. “Me too. It’s terrible. I’ve also developed this really weird craving for anything with caramel lately. I’m a nurse, so I work late shifts sometimes, and I swear, I have to stop at the vending machine for my favorite candy bar, or I won’t survive the night.” Reese smiled, enjoying this easy conversation as she watched the flames engulf her marshmallow. “You know, we’ve met before, right?” Orly asked.
“No, I don’t think so.” Reese would’ve remembered meeting her. Orly was beautiful with long curly blonde hair and a warmth about her that not many people had these days.
Orly pulled her marshmallow out of the fire and blew out the remaining flames on it. “We did. Back at Desert Cove Psychiatric Hospital.”
Reese took an involuntary step back. The last place she expected to run into someone from there was here in Dallas. “Unless you were one of the nurses or staff there, it’s doubtful. They kept me in isolation for the most part.”
“I was the voice in your head,” Orly said plainly, as if it was the most obvious thing in the world.
“What?” Reese couldn’t have heard her right. She’d never told anyone about that voice. Not her doctors. Not even Garrett. There were days Reese convinced herself she’d actually lost her mind in that place and had simply imagined it.
“You told me that your brother put you in that awful place. That they were being horrible to you, making you take medicine you didn’t need.”
Reese gasped and put a hand up to cover her mouth. Shehadsaid that to the voice. “That - that was you?”
Orly nodded, offering her a kind smile. “Yep. That was me. I was being held in the basement by some of Russell’s men, but I had no idea where I was. It wasn’t until I heard your screams through the vent, and then in my head, that I was finally able to tell Luke how to find me. Us.”
Reese couldn’t believe she was actually meeting the woman who’d saved her from a lifetime of misery, not to mention being drugged against her will. The fact that Orly even existed, that she was real, was unbelievable. She owed Orly everything. “Wait, you know Russell? How were you able to get a message to Luke if you were being held by his men?”
“I can talk to my husband the same way I talked to you that day. Only, with him, I’ve kept the channel open so we can talk like that whenever we want to. With most people, once I get them help, I usually let the connection break off.”
Reese couldn’t believe her ears. “Most people? You’ve helped others like that?”
Orly sighed. “All the time.”
“That’s amazing. I don’t think I’d be here today if it wasn’t for you. I mean, you literally saved my life. I can’t thank you enough for what you did for me that day.”
Orly shrugged. “You have nothing to thank me for. I’m the one who should be thanking you. If you hadn’t given me the name of that place, I wouldn’t have been able to tell Luke where I was, and who knows when or if he would’ve ever found me.”
Reese swallowed back the tears clogging her throat. “We saved each other.”
Orly nodded. “We did. Just one more reason why I’m so happy Garrett found you and brought you here. I was in such a bad place back then, it never even occurred to me that you still needed my help after I disconnected from you. I’m so sorry for leaving you abruptly like that.”
“Don’t be ridiculous. You had Russell to deal with. He might be my step brother, but I’ll be the first to admit, he’s not a good guy. Why was he going after you?” Reese asked.
“When I first met Russell, I was living in Los Angeles. I picked up a shift in the Emergency Room of the hospital I worked at, and he came in with a colleague who’d needed some stitches. Russell was charming and charismatic, and we hit it off. I felt like I’d struck gold with him. After we got engaged, I was home alone one night and I heard the pleas of a woman who had a gun pointed at her head. In her last moments of her life, right before the trigger was pulled, I got to see through her eyes, and the man who killed her was Russell.”
Reese gasped in horror. “Oh my God. You didn’t tell him what you saw, right?”
“That was my biggest mistake. He punished me for it relentlessly. For my gift. For accusing him. For everything.”
“I’m so sorry, Orly. You didn’t deserve that. Were you able to get any charges filed against him?”
“No. It was his word against mine, and he turned out to be way more convincing and powerful. He claimed he was chasing after a wanted fugitive, even though we both knew he wanted to kill me.”