“What clues?” Jessie asked.
“Pieces of paper with somebody’s name on it,” she said quietly.
“Whose name?”
“The only man I can really trust to find us,” she said. “I sure hope that the US sends a SEAL team to rescue us, but I can’t guarantee that they will. It’s too politically charged over here for them to really want to get involved.”
“So who else would come?”
Brenna gave a bitter laugh. “Somebody who probably wouldn’t come, even if he knew it was me.”
“Wow, a lot of history there,” she said. “Sounds like you need to tell me about it.”
“Nothing to tell,” she said, with a shrug. “Sometimes life is just what it is.”
“No,” she said, “sometimes it’s way worse. Maybe you need to give me a little bit more information.”
“We were very close,” Brenna said. “Married briefly. We split up in a very ugly fight. I ended up hooking up with another friend, and I never saw my ex-husband for a long time. Last I heard from him, he had contacted me just before I was due to marry Princeton,” she said. “I didn’t respond to his voicemail at all. I think it was supposed to be a congratulation, but all I heard was some bitterness in it.” She shrugged, stared out at the long history in her mind, and said, “Some things are just not very easy to sort out. Anyway the wedding didn’t go ahead, and I never had any contact from Princeton or Jerricho again.”
“So why would you think Jerricho would be somebody who could do this?”
“I read a couple articles about him. Then I asked a few friends of his, people in the navy back then. He had signed up with a bunch of friends, and I kept in touch with them. He made it on a SEAL team,” she said. “And then was selected to do a bunch of private missions. And this would classify as a private mission.”
“You mean, like from the public sector?”
“Meaning that he and maybe one other would go with the team to back them up. He was really good at infiltrating the enemy apparently.” She laughed. “He sure infiltrated my heart and then destroyed it.”
“Sounds like you were young and stupid back then,” Jessie suggested.
Brenna looked at her friend and burst out laughing. “I was a stuck-up bitch,” she said, “until my fiancé left me and showed me exactly what I had been,” she said. “I wasn’t very proud of myself at that moment. Princeton walked away, left me at the altar to face everybody. But not before he announced that he couldn’t possibly live with somebody who was as judgmental and as difficult to get along with as me. I was devastated, and I was mocked by all my friends for his actions.
“It took me a long time and a lot of counseling to figure out that, although his methodology had been really rough, and his delivery had been brutal, Princeton was also right. I had a lot of good qualities, but I had let my privileged upbringing in a wealthy family destroy my inner core of who I really wanted to be. After that, I changed my entire focus and my career, went into finding the truth, and here we are,” she said in a contemplative voice.
“Wow,” Jessie said, “most people aren’t quite so harshly truthful about their own personality.”
“No, but I needed to face it,” she said, “and I did send Princeton an email, a long time afterward, saying that—although he had been an absolute ass and had really broken my heart and had devastated me at the time—I’m sure he would like to know that I had grown up through the process and that I was a very different person from who I was then. He emailed me back and said that he was in counseling himself because of what he’d done, knowing that he’d hurt me and had caused me such pain, and that he was still a big mess. But he was happy if I’d managed to move on because maybe that would allow him to as well.” At that, she gave a lopsided grin to Jessie. “So we never really understand what goes on inside one another.”
“What set him off?”
“I guess just one more of my demanding emails about the perfect wedding. You know? Bridezilla. Yeah, I was a bridezilla, and he couldn’t handle it, and he was right. He shouldn’t have to handle it,” she said. “If I ever get a chance to marry again, I think it’ll be on a beach at sunset, with just the witnesses and the minister. Anything would be a lot easier than what I went through back then. Now, every time I hear about weddings, I just get the chills.”
“No wonder,” she murmured. “That’s hardly an easy way to go.”
“I was also twenty-one, and maybe I was still reeling from all the headaches of my lovely relationship with Jerricho,” she said. “Really loved that man but I didn’t really know what love was. I was so in love with myself, and I had this really good ability to project, to be the person that they wanted me to be. Yet, when they found out what I was like inside, it was just bad news. I was such a bitch back then. I was raised by a bitch, an upper-class snob. My sister was a first-class bitch. I fell in line behind her. But inside, I was at odds with it all. When it all blew up, that part of me actually had a chance to step forward and to say, ‘Stop. you need to be you. You don’t need to be a clone of them.’”
“I’m sure your parents didn’t love the wedding scenario very much.”
“No, they absolutely trashed Princeton and basically took his business and burned it to the ground, so he could never be in the same town anymore,” she said. “I’m not happy or proud of what they did either, but the fault lies with me. I can’t blame them for everything.”
“I’ve never heard you talk like this before,” Jessie said, quietly studying her.
“We’ve never been in a scenario where we’re facing death quite the same either.”
“Are they planning to kill us, do you think?”
“I’m split,” she said. “Half of the time I think, yes, and I’m grateful. The other half the time I think, no, and I’m grateful.”
“I guess a lot of things are worse than death, aren’t they?”
“Especially for women, who are now captives,” Brenna said quietly.
Jessie sucked her breath tight against her throat and said, “I was really trying not to go that direction.”
“Try all you like,” she said. “I know that Jerricho would be perfectly capable of getting us out, but I’m not at all sure he’d care.”
“If it’s his job, he would,” she said. “The SEALs are well-known for doing what they’re supposed to do and doing it well.”
“But I don’t think anyone in the US will consider us important enough.”
“But still it’s a statement to kidnap two American journalists out of a crowd like that.”
“I just wonder if anything else is behind it or if it’s just that simple—take two women journalists. Maybe our kidnappers didn’t even know we were the media. Maybe they thought we were just assistants,” she said, with that twist of her lips. “You know how little value we women journalists have over here.”
“Yeah, that’s another thing, isn’t it?” Jessie said. “It’s not easy being female in our industry.”