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  “I have to leave soon,” he said.

  “I get that,” she said. “So hopefully the cell phone is coming tonight.”

  “We’ve been watched.”

  She looked at him in surprise. “What? We knew about the one person for several days, but I haven’t seen anything since. Have you?”

  “Not the same person. No,” he said. “But I have seen others.”

  “Strangers?” she asked, stiffening.

  He looked at her in surprise. “I don’t know if they’re strangers to you or not,” he said. “This is your life and your friends here. But they are strangers to me.”

  She nodded. “Which doesn’t necessarily mean anything.”

  “One appeared to be a soldier of some kind,” he said. “He was very quiet and stealthy, moving through the area. He certainly didn’t want to be seen.”

  “Did you talk to him?”

  “No,” he said, with that lopsided grin that she’d come to love. “Absolutely not.”

  “And why is that?”

  “Because I got the feeling he was after more than conversation.”

  She stared at him for a long moment, studying the hardness in his gaze. “Maybe,” she said, “but maybe you’re just overreacting.”

  He looked at her and said, “Sweetheart, overreacting keeps me alive.”

  “And are you so sure that he’s after you? That you need to be worried about it?”

  “Without a doubt.”

  “Then you did right,” she said simply.

  He frowned. “Is it all that simple?”

  “Sometimes the only thing we can do,” she said, “is follow our heart.”

  “Well, I don’t have anybody in my past pulling my heart one way or the other,” he said. “What about you?”

  “Nope,” she said.

  “Ever married?”

  “Nope.”

  He looked at her in surprise. “You’re wasting the best years of your life here on the island alone,” he said. “I’m not trying to insult you, but it makes me sad.”

  “Maybe I’ve had enough of people,” she replied. With that, she turned and walked up several of the rock ledges from the river. “I’m not sure I can leave this place anymore.”

  “Sure you can. You don’t have to leave it permanently.”

  “No,” she said, “that’s true. This is my space, my corner of the island.”

  “You own the land?”

  “Yes,” she said, “I do.”

  “So you really could leave and come back anytime you wanted to,” he said.

  “I’d probably get to the edge of my property and decide that was far enough,” she said, laughing. He didn’t say anything more. She wasn’t sure what else to say, so she turned to practical matters. “If you’re ready for breakfast, I have some fresh buns.”

  “You don’t buy much for supplies here, do you?”

  “Only in the last few months,” she said.

  He looked around and nodded. “Yeah, speaking of that, I need to make that right, so what do I—” At that she turned and glared at him fiercely, and he held up a hand. “I’m just asking.”

  “No. You don’t owe me anything,” she said. “Pay it forward when you see someone needing a hand.”

  “That’s easy,” he said. “I’m pretty sure I do it all the time anyway.”

  “Do you?”

  “I think so,” he said, frowning. “But you’ve got me there because that memory isn’t quite filling in.”

  “What if you find out that you’re not who you think you are?” she asked.

  “I’m pretty sure I know who I am at this point,” he said. “I’ve got enough memories in there that, although the spotty holes are very frustrating, a lot of them are mostly filled in to understand the kind of work I did, which side of the fence I worked on, and the type of skills I had.” He looked down at his body and said, “By the way, I’ve done a hell of a lot of medical work.”

  She looked at him in surprise. “Are you sure?”

  “Yeah, so if you were in the same condition I was when you found me, I could have done the same for you.”

  “You’re a doctor?”

  “I think so,” he said, frowning, “but I’m not exactly sure. I have the training and experience, but I don’t know if I have the certificates.”

  “Military doctor maybe?” she asked.

  “Who knows? Maybe,” he said thoughtfully. “But I have done a lot of surgeries. And, at home, I have extremely high-end equipment.”

  She looked at him with interest. “Knowing that,” she said, “is worth its weight in gold.”

  “It is, and I think a whole community depends on me.” He again frowned at that. “That sounds very arrogant of me, and I don’t mean it that way.”

  “So you have like a surgery day or an open clinic maybe?”

  His face cleared, and he nodded. “All the neighbors in the surrounding community,” he said, “they come to me.”

  “And you live where?”

  “Africa,” he said, triumphant, since that had been a gap that was problematic. Then he stopped and said, “Something about Tunisia too. On the border?” He shook his head. “I don’t know, but I know my world is pretty global.”

  “Must be nice,” she said, and she proceeded to prepare breakfast, while trying to keep her thoughts to herself.

  “You’ll be okay when I leave?” he asked again.

  She looked at him in surprise. “I was okay before you got here. Why wouldn’t I be when you go?”

  “You didn’t have people skulking around in the bushes before, for one thing.”

  “That’s very true,” she said. “At least none that I saw. Obviously having you here has created some interest. Most of the people don’t know too much about it. The local villagers did, but you were close to dying at that point in time. I don’t think they thought you would live, so now that you’re up and about, you’re causing more of a stir.”

  “But who would have seen me?”

  “Fishermen for one,” she said. “And that’s an easy thing for them to see while they’re out there.” She pointed toward the ocean.

  “I guess,” he said doubtfully.

  “And maybe somebody contacted the village, asking about you,” she said. “We’re not that isolated. We try to stick to ourselves and away from the big bad world out there, but we’re not completely isolated.”

  “Are you the only one from the outside world who lives here?”

  “Pretty much,” she said. “Most of the others are locals, who have lived here all their lives, which is why you’re an anomaly.”

  “Yep, but that’s okay. I’m used to standing out and attracting attention,” he said. “So will you ever go back and fight whatever injustice happened in your world?”

  “No,” Leia replied, frowning. “Some things you just can’t fight.”

  “Or maybe you have to change the way the war is won,” he said.

  “There are always people more powerful than you who do whatever they can to make you the bad guy instead of taking the blame themselves,” she said. “Honestly I don’t think I even care anymore.”

  “What if somebody else cared for you?”

  She looked at him and said, “You can’t fight everybody’s battles. You need to go get your own life back together first.”

  “Hey, my life has been running smoothly in my absence.”

  He said this with such a note of authority that she had to laugh. “Seriously?”

  “Absolutely,” he said.

  “Well, it would be nice if your team is that good,” she said, “but I wouldn’t count on it.”

  “I can definitely count on it,” he said. “They are that good, without a doubt.”

  She stared at him. “Then they are better than everybody else I know.”

  “They are,” he said, “and I won’t hide that fact. Because part of the reason they are so good is because they are my team. Chosen, trained, and looked after by me.”
br />   She studied him for the longest time, seeing the pride, the joy on his face and realizing just how far removed his world was from hers. She looked around at the island, sensing change, much like the tsunami that she’d already felt coming toward her, but she wasn’t ready for it now any more than she had been prepared back then. “I get it,” she said and then motioned at the fresh buns in front of him. “You better eat.”

  “And if I don’t?” he asked, sitting down and looking up at her. “Oh, is there any more coffee, by chance?”

  She smiled and said, “If you don’t eat the bun, I’ll eat it for you. And, yes, there’s plenty of coffee.” She walked over and poured him a cup, before sitting down across from him. She picked out one of the four rolls and gently buttered it, before taking a small bite herself.

  “You don’t eat much, do you?” he asked.

  “I don’t need to eat much,” she said. “I spend my days here in peaceful contemplation.”

  “You were doing some writing as well, I noticed.”

  “I was,” she said. “It’s a way to keep my sanity sometimes.”

  “You never told me what you did in the big bad world before you wound up here.”

  She smiled. “I was a heart surgeon.”

  He stopped and stared. “Seriously?”

  She gave him a sideways look. “Why? Can’t women be surgeons in your world?”

  He continued to stare at her, looking even more shocked at that. “Of course they can. Some of the best surgeons I know are women,” he said, “but what on earth would take you from there to here?”

  “Sometimes life doesn’t go the way we thought it would go,” she said, clearly uncomfortable with the attention.

  “If you tell me that you threw it all away for some asshole of a man, I’ll get really angry.”

  She laughed at that. “Well, let’s just say an asshole of a man was part of the reason, but it certainly wasn’t a love affair gone wrong.”

  “Okay, now I want the details,” he snapped.

  “You can want all you like,” she said. “That doesn’t mean I’m giving them to you.”

  He glared at her in frustration, while she remained serene. “I can’t understand how you can live here so calm and peaceful if something bad happened to you.”

  “But that’s exactly why I am here,” she said. “Not all injustices get resolved the way we want them to.”

  “That doesn’t mean we have to let it all go either,” he growled, clearly upset.

  “You’re really pretty much black-and-white, aren’t you?”

  “I don’t like to see the people I care about getting hurt.”

  “Neither do I,” she said. “Sometimes we make the wrong decisions, and sometimes people go against us regardless.”

  “Could I please have an explanation?”

  “Not really anything to say.” But she considered it, and, just as she would open up and share something with him, a noise came from around the corner of her cabin. She got up and walked over there, ever mindful of his comment about somebody watching them. As she got to the corner, Paolo emerged, smiling broadly with the typical island friendliness.

  “I brought you fish,” he said, holding out his hand. She accepted them. “It looks lovely, thank you,” she said warmly.

  “Your patient, how is he doing?” Paolo asked.

  “Much better,” she said, and, at that, she turned to see Bullard stepping away from her cabin.

  Paolo’s gaze widened at the size of him. “Wow, he’s doing much better.”

  Bullard smiled and said, “I’m almost healed. Did you bring a cell phone?”

  He frowned and looked at him. “I forgot.” He turned to look behind him. “My brother went though. Let me see if I can get one from him.” With that, he turned and disappeared.

  “He forgot?” Bullard said, his voice a low growl.

  “He doesn’t lie,” she said, turning back to him. She thought she heard another sound around the corner. She stepped around the side of the cabin and stared into the trees.

  Bullard reached out and put a hand on her shoulder and said, “Remember. We’re being watched.”

  She tensed immediately. “I wasn’t expecting to find danger when you got back on your feet,” she muttered. “It’s a foreign feeling for me.”

  “No,” he said, “you were dealing with the same type of attack. It’s just that yours was verbal, whereas mine will be physical.”

  “Interesting observation,” she said. “How did you know?”

  “Because if somebody didn’t physically beat you, they beat you in other ways.”

  “Oh, I was definitely hurting,” she said. “And I’ve had no contact from the outer world ever since.”

  “You just up and left?”

  “I did,” she said, and, thinking back, she realized how much she had needed that to happen. “When you’re hurt, sometimes it’s all you can do.”

  “Absolutely, but, at the same time, you’re hiding,” he said, “and you have to be prepared to reenter the world at some point. I can’t imagine anybody driven enough to become a heart surgeon could be happy here indefinitely.”

  “Well, I was,” she said. “Until a stranger washed up on my boat.”

  “Is that why you haven’t been fishing lately?”

  “I’ve been looking after you,” she said, “and Paolo, well, he likes me, so he tends to bring me fish.”

  Bullard growled behind her back. “That’s nice,” he said. “As long as he doesn’t have any expectations.”

  “He’s male,” she said. “Don’t you all have expectations?”

  He frowned at that and then nodded. “You’re right. I guess I have expectations too.”

  She spun and looked up at him. “And just what are those?”

  *

  Bullard glared at Leia. “Obviously not what you’re thinking,” he said, “but I would like to not lose you right now.”

  “Once you go back to your real world,” she said, “I’ll be a blip on your radar. Just something that happened, and, sure, you’ll remember, but soon it’ll be a distant memory.”

  “I don’t want you to be a distant memory,” he said roughly.

  “That’s what you say right now,” she said, “but, once you get back to that world, it will be completely different.”

  “Maybe,” he said, “but that doesn’t mean there isn’t room for you in it.”

  “I’m not sure there is though,” she said, “because I don’t know that I could handle it.”

  “If you want to get back to your medicine,” he said, “I do have a full-on clinic, with all the equipment you could ever want.”

  She frowned. “But I’m not licensed to practice in Africa.”

  “And I’m sure we could make that happen, if you wanted it to.”

  “I’m not sure I do,” she said. “That was part of the world I walked away from.”

  “But you don’t have to keep walking away from it.”

  “Maybe,” she said, “but I’m not sure I’m ready for that kind of change.” He frowned. “No,” she said. “Listen. My reasons are sound, and I’m just not sure I want to give people a chance to get back at me again.”

  “All you’re doing is making it so I’ll have no choice but to look into what happened to you,” he said. “It’d be easier if you just told me.”

  “Maybe, but I don’t know that I want to,” she said, pulling away from him. “I’m going for a walk. Please don’t follow me.” With that, she turned and walked away from him.

  He stared after her in frustration, trying to figure out what had happened to her. The thought that her medical skills weren’t being utilized horrified him, since he came from a world where there were not nearly enough people with those skills. Those they had were worth their weight in gold. He knew people changed careers all the time, finding they didn’t have the temperament for the type of work they were doing or something else, but, in her case, she had been hurt. He just didn’t know why.
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  Just then Paolo returned, walking up and handing over a cell phone. He smiled at the newcomer, and Paolo said, “He had it. I had asked him to get it, but I didn’t ask him if he’d gotten it before I brought the fish.” He shrugged, then, with a big grin and a wave of his hand, he disappeared into the trees.

  Bullard wondered how that worked. Was it all so nice and simple here on the island? Were people really that trusting? Part of him looked at the phone, wondering if it was being tracked. Were they that sensitive to life? Did they understand what was going on in the greater world, or were they innocent of the ways of deceit? Then again, they weren’t innocent to the ways of money because that’s what made the world go around. They may not have the same need for it that other people did, but most cultures didn’t turn down money when it was offered.

  And people would pay if Paolo had something they wanted, such as knowledge of Bullard’s whereabouts. That could be both good and bad because his own team was likely looking for him as well. At least he sure as hell hoped so. He had to hold on to the faith that what was happening was the fight between good and evil, and, as always, he would win that war. It was pretty damn hard to even consider that it wasn’t an option.

  He looked again at the cell phone, but his instincts prodded him to quickly take off the back and to look for anything added to it. But, no, it was all clear. He sighed with relief at that. He sat down and noted it had a battery, with prepaid minutes. He didn’t have a clue how many he had or what the charges would be. He also didn’t know how a cell package out here worked or even where the service came from. Thailand maybe. Thinking about the various phone numbers he could call, and knowing that it was important to calculate in time zones, he sat here for a long moment, considering who to call.

  Then he started to dial Dave. Just as he was about to punch in the last digit, he froze, realizing that connecting this call would change everything. He looked back in the direction where Leia had disappeared and knew how much change would happen in her world because of this call. He frowned, looking down at the number, and slowly let his finger off the last digit. Was he ready for that? He was stronger, and he was certainly to the point where he could leave.