Page 69 of Borrowed Pain
Patricia winced. "Six months of circling each other like wounded animals. He'd offer to walk me to my car after meetings. I'd suggest coffee at the 24-hour place down the street. We both pretended it was a coincidence when we ended up at the same grocery store or bookshop."
"How did you take the next step?"
"David had a terrible night. It was an inconsolable panic attack that lasted three hours. I showed up at the next meeting withhuge black circles under my eyes, and Thomas followed me outside afterward."
She pushed the sugar packet away from her.
"He didn't offer advice. He only stood there while I cried in the parking lot, then drove me home because I was too shaky to handle my car. He made tea in my kitchen while I got David settled."
The tenderness in her voice revealed everything about how she'd fallen for him.
"Someone was suddenly taking care of me instead of the other way around. I was desperate for basic human decency."
"But it was more than that."
"Yes." She looked up from her coffee. "He understood guilt in ways that most people don't. We'd take these long walks around Green Lake, discussing responsibility and failure and whether loving someone means protecting them from truth or exposing them to it."
"What did he tell you about his work?"
"Nothing specific. He said he'd participated in medical research that hadn't gone how he'd intended. That people were hurt because of decisions supervisors forced him to make, and he was trying to figure out how to make amends without causing more damage."
"Sounds like a lot of professional guilt."
"That's what I thought. We were two damaged people helping each other process while trying to rebuild something like a normal life."
She pulled her phone from her purse, swiping to a photo that softened her expression. It was two people on a beach somewhere, Patricia laughed while a lean man with graying hair and kind eyes folded her into his arms from behind, and a small boy in the foreground built something in the sand.
"This was last Christmas. David came with us to the Oregon coast."
Her voice broke. "For three days, he remembered how to play. Thomas taught him to skip stones, and David actually laughed when the rocks disappeared into the waves."
She touched the boy's image on the screen. "Thomas said it was like watching David's soul return to life. I thought maybe we were building something sustainable. A family."
She closed the photo. "David hasn't laughed since."
"And? You look like there's more."
"New Year's Eve. Thomas had been drinking more than usual, which wasn't like him. Around midnight, he broke down completely. Started talking about people he'd failed, and those hurt by the research he helped design."
"And then—"
"He was sobbing. Said his real name was Tobias Rook and that powerful people thought he was dead because it was safer for everyone if he stayed that way."
My pulse raced. Patricia Hendricks had fallen in love with Tobias Rook under an assumed identity.
"He told me about his life in Virginia. And he talked about federal agents who'd been investigating until someone made the investigation disappear along with the investigators."
"Lucia Reyes."
Patricia blinked and then sighed deeply. "You know. He said she'd been killed because she'd gotten too close to proving what the facilities were really doing. He was going to testify before her car went off a bridge, and he ran to avoid ending up dead."
I reached out to cover one of her trembling hands with mine. "So you've been protecting him."
"I've been loving him." Her voice was fierce. "Thomas—Tobias—whatever name he uses, he's not the monster who designed those protocols. He's the man who's spent twoyears documenting every institutional failure that enabled this network to operate."
"While you documented it from the inside."
"We've been building parallel cases. His evidence proves the medical lies and human experimentation. Mine proves the insurance fraud and institutional cover-up." She leaned forward. "It is enough to bring down the entire operation."
