pounding of Hannah’s heart moved to her head until the edge of the room turned fuzzy. “So, it could be true. My birth certificate proves it.” Tacky sweat inched through her blouse and the fuzziness stood at the edge of her vision, threatening to consume her.
“Whatever is going on, it’ll be fine. Trust in the Lord to reveal whatever you need to know when you need to know it. And from the looks of it you have a valiant protector in Derek.” Mallory’s lowered tone fought through the haze. “It doesn’t change who your parents are or who you are.”
Hannah gulped in breaths that didn’t seem to reach her lungs. The fuzziness marched in on her like a swarm of grasshoppers. Through the haze, she saw Mallory come back around the desk and sit in the other client chair. Her warm hand covered Hannah’s, her smooth, reassuring touch a rhythmic call back to the present.
“I need to talk to my mother.” She forced a strong tone, one she didn’t feel but desperately needed to push away the dark cloud that threatened to envelop her. “And my father.” Oh, her father. What would he have to say about this?
“Yes. Talk to them. And at some point, you may want to search for your birth mother.” Compassion flooded Mallory’s voice, and Hannah appreciated her delicacy. “But I want to warn you. If you do search, you may not be happy with what you find. Or you may not find anything at all. We don’t know how much the FBI knows about her past, her circumstances or even her location.”
The surrealistic nature of those options settled on her shoulders like a heavy cloak, and Hannah couldn’t force out an answer.
Mallory patted her hand. “Talking to your parents is a good place to start. But whatever news they may have, if any at all—” she paused for emphasis “—try to stay calm. Now, I will help you in any way I can if this turns out to be true. I’m willing to talk anytime, and now you have my personal phone number.” She scribbled on the back of a business card and pressed it into Hannah’s hand. “Go now, if you feel you need to, and the job is here whenever. A lot has happened, so take whatever time you need.”
After flashing her boss a grateful look, Hannah focused on the seven digits on the card until she could stand steady. “What a day.” Her stomach flip-flopped. Her parents had some explaining to do. She knew what her next move was—to get some answers and, hopefully, to stay safe.
* * *
“Are you two all right?”
Derek accepted the firm handshake of his old pal Reid Palmer. “We’re fine. Thanks for your help down there.”
“No problem. You’ve got a lot going on.”
“Yes, but not as much as Hannah. She just found out she’s adopted, her birth father is a Mafia boss and I’m the one who had to tell her.” He crossed his arms over his chest and touched his fingers to the thumb break on his shoulder holster. “Hannah’s really shaken up, understandably so. But she’s resilient. Tougher than she used to be. She’s going to need to be, with the danger she’s in.”
From his vantage point down the hallway, Derek saw the door to Mallory’s office swing open. But no one emerged.
He hadn’t let down his guard since the attack less than an hour ago, despite the fact that he saw the shooter speed away. But surely they were safe up here. There were only two doors to the suite of offices. The back door was locked, and Derek and Reid stood within view of the front door. No one had come or gone.
He moved to the window at the end of the hallway that overlooked the parking lot. The truck had not returned. But the office only faced out one side of the building, so he had no way to check all entrances and side streets. Wherever Hannah thought she was going next, Derek would not leave her side.
Voices filtered down the hallway, but he couldn’t make out any words. He nodded toward the open door. “What do you make of that?”
Reid shrugged. “They’re almost done.” Apparently, his friend wasn’t on alert, despite his own little difficulty a year or so ago with his wife, Samantha. At the time she had been on the run from a thug who had tried to kidnap her adopted daughter, Lily, and had crashed into Reid’s car. The end result was a harrowing two days and eventually their wedding. “Congrats on your graduation from the FBI academy, by the way. You were one of the best officers on the Heartwood Hill PD to work with, but sometimes we move on to other things. This your first assignment?”
“Yes. Quite a start, don’t you think?”
Reid raised his eyebrows. “Is there a history here? With Hannah?”
“Yes.” Derek jammed his hands in his pockets. “That’s why I’m here. My supervising agent thought it best if the FBI sent someone Hannah knows. What they don’t know are the details of our past.”
“And?”
“We dated secretly in high school our senior year. Her family is super wealthy and upper class. My aunt and uncle were most definitely not upper class. We knew her parents would never approve, so we kept it a secret. Nearly every Friday night, we would go to the library to study. She just didn’t tell her parents that she was with me. We would drive in to the Indianapolis library, where no one knew us except the librarians, and they didn’t care.” Images of a seventeen-year-old Hannah contrasted in his thoughts with the Hannah he had rescued today. She had only grown more beautiful. More compelling.
“Let me guess.” A frown creased Reid’s brow. “Someone found out.”
Derek nodded. “Her father.” He shrugged, but tension made it difficult to relax his shoulders again. “I don’t know how. I just know that one day we were planning on attending college together, and the next, I was summoned to the McClarnons’. Her father told me clearly that I was to leave her alone. What else could I do? Mr. McClarnon was—is—a powerful man. I didn’t want to get on his wrong side. I knew I wasn’t good enough for her anyway. We had been naive to think that a relationship could work.”
“So you didn’t see her again?”
“I saw her at graduation a couple of days later. I never got close enough to talk to her. That was it. She went away to college. Her parents moved from Heartwood Hill to Lafayette, an hour away. The end.”
“Are you sure?”
“Yes.” She wasn’t his Hannah any longer. Never would be.
“Does she know her father forbade you from seeing her?”
That was the toughest part. “No.” Mr. McClarnon had also strongly suggested that Derek not tell Hannah anything of their meeting. As far as she knew, he had just abandoned the relationship.
Derek prayed for the strength and tenacity to complete this first assignment for the FBI. He was over her, right? The fact that there had been no one else in the intervening years simply attested to his devotion to his job. But he couldn’t help wondering if his superior had known the specifics of their romantic past, would he have assigned someone else?
It didn’t matter now. He was here, standing in the hallway waiting for the beautiful and sweet Hannah McClarnon to emerge from a meeting with her employer. This mission had no close alignment with his heart. It was just the first in what would hopefully be a long line of successful missions in his future.
Reid shifted to lean against a doorjamb, pulling Derek’s focus from his inner thoughts, and nodded toward the office where Hannah was. “So what about her birth family?”
“I don’t know a lot.” He jammed his fists in his pockets as if that could release some of his pent-up frustration. “The short version is that we have an informant on the inside of a crime family operating out of Chicago. One of their so-called captains has been looking for a former girlfriend and their daughter that disappeared over twenty years ago. Now, he’s found the girlfriend. We believe that the girlfriend was forced to give up information about the daughter. That daughter is Hannah.”
“And the birth mother?”
“I don’t know.