“What happened? If you can say.”
“Something went wrong, as they do sometimes with that type of work. You can gather mountains of intelligence, but that one tiny thing you don’t know could be the thing that makes everything fall apart.”
I nodded. I had firsthand knowledge of that.
“She died,” I said.
Carter nodded, clearly miserable. “And there was nothing I could do to prevent it. Even worse, we had to leave her there or we would all have died with her and the mission would have been a complete failure.”
My stomach rolled and my breath caught in my throat. It was a soldier’s worst nightmare…to leave a member of their unit behind. Losing a member was bad enough, and almost always left the others with horrible guilt, even when there was nothing they could have done to change things. But in Carter’s case, all that was amplified by his feelings for the woman. It was a million times more devastating. A million times more painful. And in that instant, I understood why he couldn’t have a relationship with me. He couldn’t take that loss again. And someone like me had a high risk of repeating the very horror he’d been trying to avoid. Every day, he’d be looking over my shoulder, worried that someone was gunning for me.
“I’m so sorry,” I said. “I won’t say I understand how you feel because I don’t. I’ve never lost anyone under those circumstances, not anyone I had deep feelings for. And I understand why you can’t be involved with me. I don’t blame you. If I were in your place, I wouldn’t want to either.”
“But that’s the problem. I know I don’t want the things you bring into my life, but it doesn’t stop me from still wanting you. I just don’t see any way to resolve it…”
“As long as I’m still with the CIA,” I finished.
He nodded. “And you’re sure that’s where you want to be?”
The tiny bit of hopefulness in his voice almost did me in. But how could I answer? Right now, I was uncertain of almost every aspect of my life from my past to my future. I was drowning and in desperate need of a life preserver.
“That answer used to be easy,” I said finally, “but now, I’m not so sure. I’ve spent all my time and energy dedicated to my job without ever asking myself why. It wasn’t until I came here that I even realized I should be.”
“Harrison told me your mother died when you were young. Maybe if she hadn’t, you would have had more than one path to consider.”
I nodded, just now realizing that although Carter knew who and what I was, the only things he knew about my past were what Harrison had told him.
“I’m sure you’re right,” I said. “My mother was nothing like my father. Looking back, I have no idea why they ever got together, and if she’d lived, I wonder if she would have stayed with him for the long term.”
“But he didn’t have a long term either.”
“No. He was killed on a mission when I was fifteen.”
“What happened to you after? Did you go to family?”
I shook my head. “Both sets of grandparents died when I was a baby and my parents were only children. I think I have some distant cousins, but I’ve never met them. You can’t exactly drop a teenager in on strangers. That’s not a good situation for anyone.”
“Foster care?”
“God no! Morrow made sure I avoided that horror. My father had made provisions that Morrow be in charge of my care in the event that something happened to him. Morrow is the closest thing to family that I’ve got. He and his wife took me in until I finished high school, which I managed to do a year sooner than scheduled, so I was only with them a little over a year. I had insurance money from both parents, so college wasn’t an economic issue. I graduated and went straight to the CIA.”
Carter shook his head. “Wow. That’s a whole lot for you to handle at such a young age. So you went from living with your father, who was CIA agent extraordinaire, to living with his boss, who has his own reputation for his accomplishments back in the day. It’s no wonder you had a one-track mind. You’d never known anything else.”
“That’s true, but it’s the easy way out as far as explanations go.” I leaned across the table and looked him directly in the eyes. “See, if it was just a matter of doing things because of other people, I could walk away without a qualm, but the truth is that what I do is part of me. Coming to Sinful has taught me so many things about myself, but one of the big ones is that what I do is part of who I am. If it wasn’t, I would never have let Gertie and Ida Belle involve me in things I should have kept well out of.”
I could tell he wasn’t overly happy with what I said, but at the same time, he understood it. After all, he hadn’t returned to Sinful and taken up shrimping. He’d gone into law enforcement. I truly believed that some people are called to that type of work and are unable to do anything else.