He gave it a nanosecond of consideration. “Okay, what is it?”
“Bridget.”
Bridget? “I like that name, but Zoe suits you so much better. So much more alive and wild than Bridget.”
“Zoe means new life,” she said softly, the words spoken almost as if she’d memorized them or she was quoting someone.
“Is that why you changed it?”
Her knuckles whitened on the basket rim. “I didn’t change it. Pasha did.”
Her aunt was even crazier than Zoe, that was for sure. “Don’t tell me: a butterfly landed on her teacup and flapped out a new name in Morse code?”
She didn’t laugh. Instead, she bit her lower lip and cast her eyes down. “I was in the Texas foster care system as a child.”
“Really?” He tried to wrap his head around that. Why would she keep something so big from him? “You never told me.”
“Because I never tell anyone.”
On his belt loop the cell phone he was required to carry rang, jarring both of them.
“Whoops, I forgot to tell you that you’re supposed to turn that off up here,” she said. “FCC rules.”
He glanced at the phone. “It’s not a call, it’s one of those new SMS messages the hospital put us on instead of pagers.”
“Are you on call today?”
“No, but there’s one patient who started a new treatment yesterday and I asked the shift nurse to shoot me a message on his status.”
She nodded toward the phone when it rang again. “Then you’d better check it.”
“Hold your thought.” Pulling out the new hospital-issued flip-phone, he snapped up the cover.
Must talk. Very important!
He peered at the message, then the number, recognizing it instantly. Of course Adele would have access to every resident’s number. And use it to stalk him. She wasn’t going to let go of him that easily, was she? She’d been hounding him for four weeks, even though he’d broken up with her as civilly as he could and had stopped taking her calls.
He shook his head. “Not important.” He focused on Zoe and this conversation, since everything the woman he loved said was far more important than messages from the one he did not. “Why were you in foster care if you have your Aunt Pasha?”
“She’s not my aunt.”
“Great-aunt,” he corrected.
“Not that either. She was my next-door neighbor.”
Now he really scowled. “And she adopted you?”
“She…took me.” She gnawed at her lip and forced herself to meet his gaze, even though, he could tell, that wasn’t easy. “She saved me. I was in trouble when I was ten years old, I was in…” She searched for a word, then shook her head in frustration. “Trouble. And I had to get away from the trouble. So Pasha, the next-door neighbor, took me and—”
“Wait.” He didn’t understand. “The neighbor took you? How?”
“She ran away with me. I needed help and she…” Zoe reached for his arm. “Pasha saved my life, Oliver. She kept me and changed our names and we moved constantly from town to town, and she got fake IDs made so we could manage and we stayed off the grid and under the radar.” The words spilled out, each one a little harder to believe than the one before. “If you want to get technical about it, she kidnapped me.”
The basket buffeted by a gust of wind, the balloon suddenly dropping at least five feet while Oliver’s stomach felt like it plummeted another two hundred.
Zoe whipped around to adjust the valve.
“She kidnapped you?” How was that even possible? “And no one ever caught her?”
“Not yet.”
The phone, still in his hand, rang again. While Zoe worked the valves and the balloon bounced, Oliver read the next message.
I’m serious, Oliver! This is an EMERGENCY!
He stared at the words but didn’t really see them, his whole being waiting for Zoe to finish, his brain trying—and failing—to squeeze this new information into what he knew about her. She’d been kidnapped?
“That’s why we move so much,” she said, finally turning back to him, her cheeks pink from the wind. Or maybe that was shame. Which was crazy because she hadn’t done anything wrong.
Except go along with the insanity, bouncing through life with her crazy aunt-neighbor with as little stability as this balloon.
“Zoe, you have to fix this problem. It’s been, what? Fourteen years?”
“There’s no statute of limitations on kidnapping,” she said, her tone full of the authority of someone who’d done her research. “She could still go to jail.”
“What about you?”
“Me? I didn’t do anything, but I have to protect her.”