Twisted and Tied (Marshals 4)

She gave me a bright grin. “The question truly is what you can live with and what you can live without.”

“What do you mean?”

“Do you have to be a hero every day? Do you crave the excitement of being in the field?”

I would miss being with the others, but the fugitive pickups, the chases—just everything I’d done that morning with Kage—none of that was really me. Ian was the guy who liked kicking down doors; I liked the mop-up part of it, protecting the innocents, extricating them from filth. That was the part that gave me satisfaction, the knowledge that I’d set someone on a new road. “I like helping people,” I told her.

She nodded. “Will you miss your partner?”

“Well, actually, I’m married to my partner.”

“Yes, I know,” she said, surprising me. “But what I mean is will you miss working with him during the day?”

Absently I touched the stitches in my eyebrow, and it hit me that I hadn’t really worked with Ian in weeks. It seemed like he was loaned out to SOG or on ops with them almost daily now. It was why I wanted to make sure he ate in the morning, because he’d walk in the door after me at the end of the day like a ravenous wolf. I didn’t get to look after him over the course of a day anymore because I didn’t see him.

“Custodial WITSEC is the liaison between social services and underage witnesses.”

“Yeah, I know.”

“Also reports of child abuse, including endangerment, physical as well as environmental neglect, issues of adoption, and things like college placement all fall under our purview.”

“Well, I had to put Cabot, Drake, and Josue all in college.”

She smiled. “Yes, I know you did.”

“So at least that part I can do.”

“I understand that you yourself were once a ward of the state.”

I glared at her. “Exactly how long were you studying up on me?”

“Sam has had this idea for a while—as I told you—of you in Custodial. You must have done something that impressed him.”

Again came that feeling of surprise because that was not at all the impression I got from him on a day-to-day basis. “He always acts like all I do is piss him off.”

“It’s probably more that he worries about you getting hurt.”

“Hurt?”

“Mmmm-hmmm,” she mused.

“Not physically.”

“No.”

I cleared my throat. “I don’t think that’s it.”

“You were in the system,” she commented. “Were you homeless at eighteen when you graduated from high school?”

“Yes.”

“So you had nowhere to go except college.”

I nodded.

“Well, that might be a lot to make you relive over and over, don’t you think?”

I shrugged. “It doesn’t bother me. It was a long time ago.”

“Over and done is not the same thing as seeing other children carry their belongings from one house to another just as you did.”

I felt the tightness in my chest as I remembered that, remembered having to leave people’s houses and feeling like I was nothing, my clothes and knickknacks in garbage bags, making that whole experience that much worse. I was worthless—so was everything that was mine, which was why now, today, all my possessions were quality.

I spent too much on shoes, socks, everything, anything. I knew that, and I knew why. It was why people became hoarders: because once you lost it all, had not one thing to point to and call your own, it was a brand seared into your soul. The second that changed, once you could have whatever, buy whatever, there had to be more and more until the hole inside was all filled up.

I got lucky there. When I turned eighteen and went to college, I met the four women who were still my dearest friends. Through them, because we all lived together and they shared everything with me from food and money to paintings on the walls and rugs on the floor, from their TVs and game systems to getting me a phone for Christmas… as a direct result of being shown that friendship was the real prize, not stuff, I learned the ebb and flow of possessions. I didn’t become a hoarder, though my shoe collection was vast, but kids I didn’t know also needed to learn those lessons. Trust took longer, trust I had just recently mastered with Ian coming into my life, but maybe I was supposed to pass on something. Pay it forward, as it were.

“You’re thinking really hard,” Prescott apprised me.

“Yeah, I do that sometimes.”

She chuckled.

“Not often, mind you.”

She sighed deeply. “Well, tomorrow’s your first day here. I suggest you go talk to your partner and find out what he thinks about all of this. At this point this is an interim assignment, and it’s up to you what you want it to be. I know Sam Kage, and he would never simply do something without asking you; that’s not how he works. You just need to figure out what it is you want.”