Taken (24 page)

“My rock is very jagged. My history hasn’t been worn down by time yet, hasn’t been smoothed off.”

He thought that image was right on target. She was just beginning to smooth down her past’s rough edges, just beginning to figure out what she would build on it in the future.

A couple of minutes passed in silence.

“How long will it be before I’m back together enough that I could get married?” Shannon asked.

He shot her a surprised look, turned thoughtful. He mulled over the two diaries he’d read. “Five years, I think. Seven, if you want to get to a really good outcome. You’ll need a doctor in the mix to help you process that whole part of your life.”

“That’s a problem.”

“My assessment?”

“No. You’re probably right, which is depressing. But it’s way too long.”

“You need time to work through the past, Shannon. Wanting to fly through that process will only cause problems and a crash you won’t be ready for. Becky tried rushing things and quickly learned that healing is time-consuming work. The best thing you can do now is to accept that truth.”

She shifted around to look at him. “If I tell you something that might end up embarrassing you, would you just listen and hear me out? I didn’t plan on putting this into words. At least not yet.”

“If I get too embarrassed I’ll tell you,” Matthew said with a grin.

She grinned back. “Fine. Okay. I’m twenty-seven. You know that. I’ve got a personal list that matters a great deal to me—it’s one of the ways I survived. It’s my list of five major things I would do when I had my freedom. Item three on that list is to get married. Item four is having kids. I don’t want to be watching my son or daughter graduate when I’m sixty. Hopefully I’m having my first child by the time I’m thirty-five, so I’ve got the family I want before I’m forty.”

He pictured Shannon as a mom and nodded, easily able to see little girls who looked like her.

“I know I have a horrible past that some guy is going to have to cope with. And I haven’t even graduated from high school yet myself. So the thought of locating and choosing a husband is not a small concern for me. I’ve spent considerable time deliberating on the problem. It’s going to have to be someone who can handle who I am, a Christian, someone who doesn’t
use violence or anger in his voice or actions. That’s the stuff I know for certain. I chose you as the person I contacted for a long list of reasons. One of which is simple. You might already know the guy who’s going to be my husband, or a friend of yours knows him.”

Her words startled him, and he was glad for the red light so he could turn to look at her. “Shannon—”

“Just listen, okay?” she asked, stopping his comment. “Let me dump the whole thing. I considered the ways you could help me, and it wasn’t just that you’d be able to smooth the way back to Chicago and meeting my family, be a buffer with the cops, be helpful in finding the right doctors—though those points were on the list. It was that you would understand my past and how it has impacted me. It’s not going to be easy finding a man who wants to be my husband, who’s willing to stick with me for a lifetime. I want someone of strong character, someone able to work through whatever is going to arise. The best place to find my husband is very likely going to be a guy who had a family member or friend who went through something like you endured with Becky or who has someone in their life still missing. Those are guys you know, so don’t dismiss this hope. Guys like . . . well, Bryce, but he’s already taken.”

Matthew smiled at the name. “Perfect. But as you say, taken.” He nodded thoughtfully, not really surprised by what she’d said. Shannon thought far ahead, he knew that about her. “I accept your point. It’s actually a rather elegant point.” The light changed, and he put his attention back on the road. “The man you want as a husband should have all those dynamics.”

“And I don’t have time to be casual about this, Matthew. I have eight years to go from where I am now to being happily married and having my first child. That is, frankly, a rushed
proposition. According to your timeline, it may be nearly impossible, but I’m determined to keep that dream alive. My decision to track you down was deliberate.”

He risked a quick glance over at her. “I’ve figured that out.”

“Then in the spirit of being honest, you probably deserve to know I’m using you to answer some questions I have,” Shannon admitted. “Here are three: I want to know if I’ve got a panic reaction around guys. I’ve figured out I probably don’t. Second, I still like being held. I wondered about that for years because I’d come to hate it. Third, it’s nice being the center of a guy’s attention. I’ve tried to stay unnoticed for so long, I wasn’t sure how it would feel to be the focus of a guy’s attention. And just to put an embarrassing point out there—I’d like to know how I react to a kiss, given how bad the memories are of some others I’d rather forget. If that question happens to get checked off with you, I think it would be nice. You’re a nice guy.”

He didn’t dare look at her.

“I’m trying to sort out in my mind how bad the damage is,” she summed up, biting her lip. “What do I need to fix in order to have my personal list come true? Husband is on that list. Having a family. I’m not thinking about you that way, mainly because you’re too important to my long-term plan for me to risk messing things up. But I decided early on that the better you know me, the better the advice you’re going to give me when I ask you who you think I should date.” She reached over and rested her hand briefly on his arm. “Now I’m done. What do you think?”

The silence lingered after her startling speech.

“There are only five things on your personal list?”

She nodded. “It’s a short list so I can tick them off on my fingers, focus on them, get them accomplished. Five items.”

“Tell me all five. I’ll help you get them done.”

“No reply to what I just told you?”

“I’m thinking about what I want to say. I won’t make the mistake again of underestimating how much you strategically think and plan.”

“You’re insulted?”

“You’re reading me wrong. I’m fine, Shannon. Fifteen years my junior and you just . . . impressed me.” Parking for the apartment was ahead on the left, and he had never been so relieved to know a conversation was going to go to pause. “Show me your list. We’ll have round two of this conversation later.”

“Or maybe not?” she said softly, clearly bothered by his neutral response. He shot her a quick glance, could see her retreating, regretting having said what she did.

“It can’t be more embarrassing than round one,” he mentioned, hoping to lighten the moment. He parked the car, came around to her side as she stepped out. He locked the car, and then he deliberately rested a friendly arm across her shoulders as they walked to the elevator so he could put this conversation into its place in their relationship.

“Shannon, I will help you reach your dreams. Including the important one of finding a husband. And because I’m not an idiot, after I see you back to the apartment, I’m going to head out for a couple hours, go talk to Paul about what they’ve found since we left this afternoon, and give us some breathing room before I comment on what you told me. You can call if you need me, but otherwise I’ll see you in the morning.”

“Distance being the better part of valor.”

He looked at her quickly, saw her expression, and smiled. “Something like that.” They had reached the elevator and stepped inside. “I don’t mind a bit of flirting, just to see how
it might feel. You are beautiful, and you’re finding your balance as a woman. It’s enjoyable to watch. I just don’t want an eleven p.m. moment with you I’m going to regret in the morning, or for that matter, any situation I wouldn’t be comfortable with if my daughter were in the room. We’re friends. It’s going to remain that way.”

“Round two of this conversation should be interesting,” she said, sounding like she had regained her footing.

“Not tonight.” The elevator opened, and they walked to the apartment. He suddenly realized what was going on. “You needed a distraction, didn’t you? This entire last half hour was your way of not having to spend the night thinking about what you said to Paul today. You figuratively threw a live grenade into the mix so you’d have something else to deal with.”

She considered that, half smiled. “Yes. Maybe not consciously planned it, but that sounds about right.”

The fact he’d run headlong into one of her coping skills and hadn’t seen it coming rather startled him. Her way of coping was to focus on her future. That was what had gotten her through the crushingly hard moments; that was why her personal list of five items was so critical to her, and why talking about those items, thinking about them, planning for them mattered so much to her. He realized the layers he’d just seen her play out, and it actually rather pleased him.

He entered the security code for the apartment, swung open the door, and then he leaned down and lightly kissed her. “Think about this instead.” He pushed her gently inside, closed the door, and headed back down to go find Paul.

M
atthew was braced for some awkwardness when he first saw Shannon on Sunday morning. She was sitting at the kitchen table, a bowl of cereal and the comics in front of her. She glanced over, smiled. “Coffee’s hot. Do I have half an hour to finish getting ready for church or forty-five minutes?”

He glanced at the time. “You can take forty-five. It’s about a half hour drive. I want to slip in after the first song, leave before the final prayer.”

Shannon held out her mug. “In that case, pour me another cup of coffee.”

He brought the pot over. “No comment, Shannon?”

“On last night?” She gave him an amused look. “No.”

He’d like to know what was behind that smile, but thought better of asking. He moved to the stove to fix an omelet.

She left to finish getting ready. He sat down with his breakfast plate, reached for the comics she had been reading, enjoyed a leisurely breakfast. She rejoined him, putting on her earrings as he was finishing his last bite of toast. He folded the newspaper,
noticed the worn book she’d set on the table. “You were able to keep a Bible with you?”

“It was in my backpack, along with that first diary. They weren’t anti-religion; they just considered it not for them.”

“May I?”

He gestured toward the book, and she handed it across. He considered personal Bibles to be interesting statements about people. Hers was well-worn, heavily underlined, slips of paper between various pages. There were no notes that he could see.

“They would have torn out the page had I written anything,” she remarked.

He nodded and handed it back. “I’m glad your faith survived, Shannon.”

“It was something that was mine, that faith, something they couldn’t take away from me. I wasn’t going to
let
them take it away. Long before this happened, I used to write out a prayer I found once in a devotional book: ‘Give me endurance, Lord, and help me to go the distance for your kingdom
.
’ I liked Paul’s analogy of running a race, a soldier serving on duty.”

“I like that comparison too,” Matthew agreed.

“You don’t train warriors by keeping them out of the dirt and out of the fights,” she went on, turning thoughtful. “You train warriors by giving them what they can handle, then giving them progressively bigger assignments. You develop the best warriors by training them the hardest. God used what came to answer that prayer I had repeatedly written. He would have found a different way to train me if this terrible evil hadn’t intruded, but once it did, God was able to create a useful outcome. A solid faith is one of those outcomes. I’m stubborn, Matthew. I wanted my faith, something I deeply valued, to survive. God was there for me. It did certainly help that process that I was
able to keep a Bible with me—this book and I have traveled a lot of miles together.”

“Did you do some memorizing?”

She offered a slight smile. “I could probably do okay in one of those Bible trivia games.” She set the book aside. “What I could keep was what I could carry in a gym bag. I learned to live comfortably with the basics: a Bible, camera, diary, clothes, and a constantly changing novel.”

It was an interesting statement about her life. He chose to shift the subject. “Do you hate traveling now?”

She shrugged. “Not really. I’m good at it. I know how to find something in each day’s journey that is enjoyable. Like how to sleep deeply while someone else drives. But I’m seriously looking forward to putting down roots and being in one place for forty years.”

“Any more thoughts about where that will be? Here in Chicago near your brother and his wife?”

“Reality is shifting my answer. I think Illinois is going to be too much publicity and media attention should my brother become governor—which I think he will—and he’ll probably be in that job for the next eight years. So I’m beginning to consider where else I’d enjoy living. I’ll visit Chicago but not live here.”

“You’ve got an entire nation to choose from. Warm and sunny. Mountains. Open plains.”

She tipped her head. “I miss the ocean,” she finally said. “Not necessarily lying on the beach, but the sound of it, the sight of it, and the pleasure of being able to swim good distances. The ocean is big and free, and I love it.”

Matthew liked the way she said it. “Do you like to sail?”

She shrugged. “I’m a good sailor, but I wouldn’t care if I
never stepped foot on another boat. I do prefer a sailboat if given a choice. It tends to have more interesting things to do.”

It was time to leave for church. Matthew carried his plate to the dishwasher. “If you do come east, I know some very nice beaches that don’t get a lot of tourist traffic.”

“I’ll head that way one day,” she replied easily. “I’ll enjoy seeing them.”

“John’s picking me up at one thirty,” Shannon mentioned as they reentered the apartment after church. “Charlotte and I are going to try the stores near her home first, then work our way this direction. I figure I’ll be back around five. Have you decided on your day?”

“I’m going running with Paul and Bryce this afternoon. They use the track over at the university.”

“I like my plan better than yours,” she said with a smile.

“Want a sandwich before you go?”

“Sure. Turkey and Swiss, just a touch of mustard.” She turned toward her room to get changed. “Give me ten minutes.”

Matthew moved to the kitchen to fix them an abbreviated lunch.

Fifteen minutes later, Shannon joined him, having changed from her Sunday dress into slacks and a blouse, working to fit new earrings in place. “That looks like more than just a sandwich.”

He was cutting a tomato into slices for his own sandwich and used the knife to gesture to the place he had set for her. “Tapioca pudding. With a side of strawberries to go with the sandwich. You can start with the dessert.”

She laughed. “You know my weakness.”

“I’m learning,” he said with a grin. “Your sandwich is on sourdough bread and has a hint of mustard.”

“Perfect.”

She dropped a sheet of paper on the counter beside him. “My personal list.”

She pulled out a chair at the kitchen table and studied the sandwich he had built for her and how best to pick it up. He paused in his own sandwich preparation to lean over and read her list.

1. Graduate from high school
   
2. Get a career established in photography (start with selling photos I’ve already taken)
   
3. Get married
   
4. Have kids (three would be nice)
   
5. Every Christmas Eve and New Year’s Eve
   

She’d blacked out the last part of the fifth item. He wiped his hands, picked up the sheet, and held it to the light but couldn’t make out the words.

“That’s cheating,” she told him with a mock frown.

“I’m curious.” He put it back on the counter, read the list again, then finished creating his own sandwich. Five items held her personal dreams for her future. Number two intrigued him. “You’re interested in pursuing your photography. I like that.
Shannon Bliss, Photographer
. It has a nice ring to it.”

“I think I’m a pretty good one. That one rather depends on me figuring out where Flynn stored more of those memory cards. I’ve got a couple of ideas for where to check.”

He carried his plate and her list over to the kitchen table, pulled out a chair across from her. He scanned the list again.
He could help her get her GED, he thought—Illinois would have a process in place for an adult with some high school credits already completed. The photography—Ellie would be a place to start. She could help assess the artistic quality and monetary value of the photos, provide feedback on the overall compositions. If the Dance and Covey Gallery itself didn’t deal in photography, Ellie would know those who did.

Getting married and having kids . . . enough said for now on that subject. Shannon had calculated correctly that her future husband would best be found among those who had experience with a missing-person case—there would be grace, compassion, and knowledge that would be helpful in making a successful marriage. She’d even correctly reasoned that he would be able to help her meet men who might fit that description. The fact she had planned that carefully before choosing to approach him was . . . illuminating for how her mind worked. Item five where she had scratched out part of it was striking for how interested he was in what she’d listed.

“I’d like to add one thing to my remarks before we have round two of our embarrassing conversation,” Shannon mentioned, laying aside her half-eaten sandwich.

Matthew wanted to wince. There went any hope she was going to skip over last night. “All right.”

“I find it easy to give my affections.” She gave a small shrug, an equally small smile as she picked up her tapioca cup. “I instinctively latch on fast when I find someone I can trust. Because I know that about myself, I was careful in my choice of whom to approach. I had a list of names, and you were at the top of it.”

“I’m flattered.”

She smiled. “You should be. Which brings us to today. You have my affections, Matthew. I like you. I can accept that the
friendship we have now is all it will be, be content not to change your boundaries. But if you want to be part of my life some day in the future, I would welcome your company. I enjoyed that one-off kiss very much. I placed my affections well, I think. I don’t know if I can ever love as freely as someone without my history, but I believe I could make you happy. I’m the faithful, loyal, one-guy kind of gal—I do know that.”

The generosity in what she opened her heart to say could only be met in kind. “I’ve toyed with the idea of asking you out on a date in three years.”

She laughed, bobbled the glass she’d just picked up, spilling some of the water. “Forgive me, Matthew, but three
years
? I’m trying to be patient with a plan that has me waiting three
weeks
.” She waved away his move to help with the spill with good humor. “I’m fine.” She used her napkin to soak up the water. “Oh, I do like you, Matthew. I need some time to get over what happened, and I do accept that. Six months is going to be plenty to know where my personal land mines are, a year after that for whatever therapy can do to have its first effect. Then I’ll reassess what life looks like. My plan was to find a guy to date sometime before the third year even starts.”

He couldn’t help but laugh, and she joined in too. Turning serious, he responded, “You may need a little more time than that. But to be fair, you were right in assuming I could make introductions to good guys you might enjoy getting to know. And I would put myself on that list—you’re an interesting, appealing woman, Shannon. You’ve just rather . . . thrown me off-balance.”

“You thought I’d be pretty damaged coming out of what happened.”

“Yes.”

“I am. I’m also just delighted to be alive. I’m not planning on letting those years be an anchor pulling me down. The interior waters are murky and still slopping around—I get that, but I can swim. I can deal with the problems that have to be faced. But I do want my dreams, and time’s a-wastin’, as they say. I’m ready to get on with my list.”

“You’ve got a good future ahead of you, Shannon. The past isn’t going to stop those dreams of yours. But you need time. And I am keenly aware I’m the first safe guy in your world—”

She lifted her hand and cut him off with a sudden grin. “It’s okay, Matthew. Enough said on this awkward conversation. I promise I won’t contribute to an eleven p.m. moment to regret. I’m simply going to enjoy the delight in having you around. It’s sort of like having a crush on a guy, something I should have been able to enjoy when I was sixteen.” She pushed her chair back from the table. “John will be here to pick me up soon. Do you think our host might own a Scrabble game or should I buy one while I’m out shopping?”

He tried to stay with the change in conversation. “There’s one on the shelf in the hall closet.”

“Want a game later?”

He wanted two aspirins, then to rewind the last half hour of conversation and hit delete. “Sure.”

Her phone rang, and she reached for it as she finished the last strawberry on her plate. “John’s on his way up,” she confirmed. Matthew pushed back his chair and went to greet John and see Shannon safely off to her afternoon shopping. Then he returned to the kitchen to finish his lunch.

He thoughtfully returned to their conversation. She was in the early days of coming out of a tragedy, fifteen years younger than him, and their friendship was already beyond complex.
Friendship was where the line had to rest. Maybe in three years, five, he could let himself consider inviting her on a date. He liked her. A lot. It was good that she liked him, that trust had formed, and true affection had followed. But she needed to live a lot longer in her new freedom before she could even be sure of what she wanted. He would do everything he could to help her spread those wings. So . . .
friends
, with some exquisite care to avoid any steps that caused her emotional turmoil. She was freer with her feelings, despite all that had happened, than he had ever learned to be with his. She’d be an easy woman to love, he realized, as she was at times simply enchanting. But he refused to let himself follow the thought.