Gabby knew she should have seen that coming. So many dead bodies. Gabby felt like she was swimming in a sea of them. She hated to ask—tried not to, but . . . “How did she die?”

“They killed her.”

Chapter Twenty-Nine
Gabby

Gabby balanced her elbows on the table. No way was she walking away now, not after that line. “Okay, let’s start again.”

“Tami Zimmer.” Rob tapped a few buttons on his phone then turned the screen around for her to read the headline.

Award-Winning Reporter Killed on Capitol Hill

The photo showed a smiling brunette, young, probably in her thirties, more ponytail-wearing than DC chic. Someone you’d want to sit down with and chat over coffee.

He flipped through a few more photos. These were personal. They showed him with Tami. Her smiling. Hiking. Out to dinner. Laughing on a couch with a cat stretched out on her lap. Images so intimate and personal that Gabby felt like she was intruding on private moments between lovers.

He took the phone back, not bothering to shut it off as he cradled it in his hands. “More than six months ago. I lost her in a supposed purse grab gone wrong.”

The screen faded to black, but Rob’s pain lingered. Gabby fought to breathe as it swallowed the air around them.

“They say the attacker slammed her to the pavement. She had a head injury that put her in a coma. She never woke up again.”

“I’m so sorry.” Gabby was all too familiar with the debilitating grief of a sudden, unexpected death. She’d been stuck in the mire of it, unable to reason or push the horror of it out of her mind. “You were close.”

“She was my fiancée.” He visibly swallowed. “And the story was flawed. The angle about stealing her purse? Impossible. She didn’t carry one. She used a small wallet. The kind she could loop around her wrist. It was in her backpack when the police returned her personal items to me.”

Gabby had to admit that sounded odd, but then she didn’t know how great Rob was at reciting facts. He could be comingling the truth with an alternate one he invented to survive Tami’s death. That sort of anguish twisted and gutted a person. Him not being okay made sense.

“We met in college,” Rob continued. “After graduation, I became the typical skeptical newspaper journalist, following stories about corrupt politicians and misspent government funds. She wrote for magazines, taking weeks, months, or however long she needed, to draw out the story behind the story. She wrote beautifully lyrical prose with heart and nuance.”

Not the talk of a man wrapped up in conspiracy theories. The pain poured out of him, spilling out and covering every word and movement with a thick layer of loss.