Power of the Keys (Jackett Family Book #2)

Chapter 18

KEYS

The pull to hold her in my arms was too strong. I had so many questions, but she was metaphorically crumbling before me and I had to do what I could. “We’re going to start from everything you remember and go from there, okay?” I can feel her nod her head against my chest, “Do you need a minute? Are you sure you don’t want to wait until the morning?”

“I’m fine, Keys. It would be better if I just get it out anyway, the memory is so fresh in my mind right now.”

“Okay, gotcha.” While I wish I could keep her in my arms forever, I do have to let her go. While I pull up another computer monitor, I grab a legal pad and a pen, sliding them over to her, “Write down anything you remember. I don’t care if it is a specific memory or something you think you remember. Hell, it can even be how you felt or the smallest detail that you saw. I can work with anything.”

She grabs the items but doesn’t get to work yet. Even though I’m typing away at my keyboard, I can feel her eyes on me still. “Don’t you have more questions?”

Her question makes me pause. I take a deep breath and think about my response first. Do I have questions? Fuck yeah, I have a million questions. I want to respect her privacy though. She has the right to keep some things to herself. If she wanted me to know, she’d tell me. “I love you, Lucy. You don’t need to tell me anything you don’t want to.”

“That didn’t answer my question, Kameron.”

“I don’t know what you want me to say, babe. If I tell you I don’t have questions, it makes it sound like I don’t care about what you went through. If I tell you I have questions, then it comes off as needy and nosy, neither of which I want to be. I’d be lying if I said I don’t worry about you. You keep some things close to protect yourself and I respect that.”

“I thought that avoiding the questions would avoid those feelings that came with answering the questions.”

“And does it?” I ask her.

She shakes her head, “No, not really. They’re all still there, just hidden away. There are things I just figured I could keep to myself, they didn’t affect anybody else.”

“Your secrets are yours, Luce. There isn’t anything you could say that could change things for me. Even if they did, you’re not responsible for me, ya know?”

I know I’m doing a shitty job answering her questions, but they don’t write manuals for this. I don’t even do relationships, so how the hell am I supposed to know what to do? I love Lucy more than anything in the world, but at the same time, I’m completely out of my league here. It seems like no matter what I say, it was probably the wrong thing. Rather than spending my time doing this back and forth with her, I’d rather be working on breaking down the video for any information that can help us with a location. I understand computers, algorithms, and software. I may love Lucy Jackett, but understanding all her intricacies is more difficult than navigating the dark web on an AOL browser.

Thankfully, Lucy gets to writing and I get to work on my end. While I know the video doesn’t contain any metadata or geotags (I already checked that yesterday), I might be able to pull some features out that will help us narrow down a location based on the facts that Lucy can give us. I’ve already figured out the name of the wallpaper she spotted as well as the direction in which the video was taken based on a likely window off-screen. If we have enough small pieces, we can put the puzzle together.

“I can’t have kids, Kameron.”

It’s clear that she doesn’t actually want to drop this, so I slide my chair away from my computer and put my attention back on her. “I kind of figured that, Goose. My biology skills are a bit rough, but I figured no uterus meant no babies.”