“I’m doing better.” Catherine paced the length of her living room, before spinning in the other direction. She sounded normal. Then again, she was completely sober, for the moment.
Julie paused, and Catherine could hear office sounds in the background, before they muted with a thud. She must have closed her office door. “Cath, are you still drinking?”
“No,” Catherine lied.
“Just hang in there,” Julie said. “Do something fun during your time off.”
They hung up a short time later and Catherine dropped her phone on the table, scrubbing her face. She should find something to eat and spend the evening not drinking.
She got half of it right. She managed to eat dinner before opening a bottle of wine.
Catherine drew a sharp breath, so disoriented that she teetered off-balance. She caught herself against the edge of something—wait, it was a desk. She was sitting in front of it. Blinking, she looked around the dark room. Nighttime. She could see sodium lights through the half-closed blinds. Where the hell had she ended up this time? The diploma on the wall was from Cornell. Realization hit her hard.
She was in Aaron Llewellyn’s office.
The light from the computer monitor in front of her registered and she looked at the screen. The first words to greet her eyes were “TOP SECRET.”
Catherine shoved herself back from the desk with a gasp. What the hell? She turned off the monitor, not wanting to risk even a glimpse of the page’s contents.
Why was she in Aaron’s office in the middle of the night, accessing something way above her security clearance?
“I have to get out of here.” The sound of her own voice startled her. “Turn off the computer.” Had it been off when she came in? Maybe she hadn’t done anything. Maybe Aaron had left it on when he’d gone for the day.
Yeah, sure. He’d just walked out for the day with a top-secret document open on his computer. That made sense.
Catherine turned the monitor back on and closed out the document without reading it, shutting the computer down. Her heart was pounding so hard she felt sick. Somehow she made it to her feet and out of the office.
How—There was no way she should have been able to get in here like this. She leaned against the wall and covered her face. Last she knew, she’d been home on her couch, it was Sunday night, but she didn’t have to go to work the next day because Aaron had suspended her. Had she been drinking? To judge by the sour taste in her mouth, yes.
Was it still Sunday?
Oh God, she couldn’t keep going on like this. She had to talk to somebody, but whom? No one had believed her so far.
Someone might.
There was one other person at NASA who didn’t seem eager to buy into the hero narrative. One other person who was trying to poke holes in her story.
One other person she might be able to talk to.
24
CAL STAGGERED DOWNSTAIRS in his condo, fumbling to get his glasses on. Christ, he really needed to talk to his neighbor about making sure his ex-girlfriends knew which door was his and which was Cal’s. This was the third time in a month he’d had a drunk, crying girl on his doorstep at two in the morning.
He swung the door open. “Look, Steve lives next—”
There wasn’t a drunk, crying twenty-year-old on his doorstep.
Catherine Wells wasn’t crying and she wasn’t twenty. Cal wouldn’t vouch for whether or not she was drunk. He stared at her blankly.
“I’m sorry to bother you so late,” she said. “I didn’t know where else to go.” God, she looked like hell. The circles under her eyes were as dark as bruises, and her clothes were mismatched and dirty.
Not knowing what else to do, he stepped back. “No, of course. Come in. What happened?” He had to ask because he couldn’t think of a single solitary thing that would cause Catherine to come to him, of all people.
She stepped into his kitchen, her shoulders hunched like a wounded animal’s.
“Here. Sit down,” Cal ushered her to one of the kitchen chairs. “Are you hurt? Do you need me to call someone?” He didn’t miss the smell of alcohol floating around her, although she seemed coherent enough.
Catherine sank into the offered chair, her dark eyes solemn. “I need to talk to someone. You were the only person I could think of who might believe me.”
That got his attention, instantly zapping him awake. “Sure, of course. Uh, do you want some coffee or something?”
“That would be great.”
He expected her to start talking while he made a pot of coffee, but she sat there, twisting her fingers together with her hands resting on the table. When he pushed the steaming mug in front of her, she ignored the cream and sugar on the table and took a long swallow, wrapping her hands around the ceramic as if it were a lifeline.
Cal couldn’t take the silence anymore. “What’s going on, Catherine?”
She didn’t answer right away.
“Look, if I’m going to help you—and I’m guessing you came here for help—you have to tell me everything.”
Her eyes darted left and right like she was looking for an escape. “I… haven’t told anybody this. Not even Dr. Darzi. Nobody wants to know. Nobody wants to figure out what really happened.”
Suddenly it became clear why she’d come to him. He nodded. “Except for me.”
“Shut up and be a hero, Catherine,” she said bitterly.
“NASA loves its happy endings,” he agreed. “So… what is it you haven’t told anyone?”
When she spoke, she spoke to her hands rather than look him in the face. “I… I keep losing time. Like, I’ll be somewhere one minute, and the next I’m somewhere else and hours might have passed.”
“Like a blackout drunk?”
She winced. “It began before I started drinking.”
Cal had a sudden image of the surprise on her face when he’d asked her about visiting NASA the night of her daughter’s graduation party. And earlier, finding her down by the archives. “So that night I met you at NASA…”
“There weren’t any graduation cards in my office. I don’t know why I was there.” Her voice cracked. “I woke up the next morning and my feet were dirty and I was tired. I had no idea why.”
“Okay, okay.” Without thinking, Cal reached out a hand and covered hers in a calming gesture. She grabbed his hand with the same force that she’d grabbed the mug, clinging to it for dear life. “What happened tonight, Catherine? What brought you here?”
She took a deep breath. “Cal, I was in Aaron’s office. On his computer.”
“How’d you get past the locked door, and his password?”
“I don’t know. But I did.”
“What were you looking at?”
“I don’t know that either. It was top secret, so I closed it.”
“Damn. That might’ve been a clue.” He was startled at how easily he believed her, but then again, everything she’d said so far fit with what he knew.
“Cal, what if I hurt someone? What if this happened to me planetside and I hurt my crew?”
Her words had a chilling effect on him. “Have you hurt anyone here?”
“I don’t think so. But Cal…” Catherine turned pale. “I’ve wanted to.”
He didn’t say anything, just watched her and listened.
“A couple of times since coming home I’ve had these… urges.”
“What sorts of urges?”
“To hurt people. It’s like this haze, like something’s taken over me, and all I want to do is strike out against whoever’s in front of me. It… It happened with you once. When you found me downstairs by the archives.”
Cal tried not to let his surprise show. She’d been so busy looking guilty, he hadn’t seen so much as a hint of anything else. “Some anger is understandable—”