Witness

The room was on fire and Harry was inside.

We were in my apartment in New York, the pages of my manuscripts flaring up like they were always meant for kindling. The alarms of the building were blaring, people were rushing out in a frenzy with the things that they loved, the fire department was scaling the side of the complex on their extended ladders. And perhaps most sinisterly of all, Damien waited outside the door, watching me try to get to Harry, with a box of matches in his hand.

“You gotta go, Mara,” he threatened, slate grey eyes glinting like flint. “You gotta find him before I do.”

I was in tears, screaming his name into the depths of my slumlord apartment, the cockroaches and mice skittering from every corner to save their lives. “Harry!” I screamed, my throat tearing with the smoke. “Harry! Harry!”

He wasn’t calling back. But in a stroke of panic, I saw him on the fire escape. There was a line of fire between us, the flames licking like hungry mouths at my ankles. I could see his eyes, so colorful compared to Damien’s lifeless pair, full of despair.

“Run Mara!” he called.

And then he jumped.

“Harry, no!” I cried, bursting into wrecking, heated sobs. Damien was behind me laughing as I screamed, the metallic sound of his gun cocking at my back ringing through the chaos. “HARRY!”

And suddenly, it occurred to me. Harry couldn’t possibly be in my apartment in New York. He had no idea of my life as Mara Hitchcock, of my life on the run from Damien Trask. And just as Damien’s voice whispered for me to say my prayers, I started slapping my face.

“Wake up!” I bawled to myself, slapping harder at my skin. “Stop!”

I was aware of the room around me but I couldn’t wake up. I could feel myself in my room in Holmes Chapel, I could feel the sting of my hands on my face, I could feel the ray of morning sunlight, I could feel the cool breeze coming through my bedroom window. But I couldn’t shake the sound of Damien’s voice in my ear, “Say your prayers, say your prayers.”

Then there was a pair of arms wrapped around my body, shushing me from a distance. Harry. “Hey, wake up,” he murmured, pulling my body to his. “Hey, it’s okay. Wake up. It’s okay.”

And suddenly, it was like I opened my own eyes for the first time that day. Stuck in another dream again, my new daily nightmare since Damien came into my life. I sucked in the fresh air to my lungs, hyperventilating with my pink-slapped cheeks. It was okay. It was just a nightmare. Harry was there.

Wait, it occurred to me. Harry is here? And…

Holy shit, we were naked. And I didn’t remember anything.

I squealed in surprise and shock, pulling my bare skin away from his and wrapping myself in a blanket. But the sudden movement caused a splitting headache, a headache so fierce it made my eyes water. I winced before I could say anything more, pressing my hands to my head as though it would help.

“Are you okay?” he asked while reaching forward to wipe a few stray tears from my cheekbones. “You were screaming.”

I blinked a few times, trying to get adjusted to all the things going on. “It happens a lot,” I mumbled awkwardly. I couldn’t help but feel awkward in that moment, buck naked and hung over with absolutely no recollection of the night before.

“Nothing happened, if that’s what you’re thinking,” Harry sighed, running a hand through his hair before reaching to my bedside table and handing me a glass of water with ibuprofen. “I couldn’t have done anything even if I wanted to. You were pretty adamant about going to sleep after you spilled a whole pitcher of water on yourself.”

I shook my head after taking three huge gulps of water, savoring the coolness as they went down. “I don’t remember any of that. I don’t think I remember anything.”

“That’s unfortunate, because I reckon you told me everything,” he muttered, his normally bright eyes unusually dark. “Mara.”

The breath caught in my lungs.

“Harry,” I gasped. “I can explain.”

“I sure hope you can,” he stated unequivocally. “Because you were not very coherent in your explanation last night.”

The panic bubbled inside me as I ran my eyes over Harry, trying to take everything in to gauge how badly I’d ruined everything. He looked tired, like we’d been out too late with too much alcohol pulsing in our bloodstreams, but not entirely wrecked. His lips were pressed into a thin line, near a grimace, which was an expression I was not used to on him. He was always sporting that graceful smile, easy as a summer afternoon. But not in my bed that morning. That morning, he was cold.

“What all did I tell you?” I asked in a small voice.

“You may as well start from the beginning,” he muttered. “You weren’t worth much once you lay down on the grass.”

Then I remembered. That’s right, I thought to myself, allowing the blanket to droop – it wasn’t anything Harry hadn’t seen before, anyway. Mary had told him to take me outside to get some fresh air and I’d confronted him about being in One Direction and it had gone well enough. But then I told him that I was Mara Hitchcock, not really Lilia George, because I was in Witness Protection. Because Damien Trask wanted to kill me.

I sighed before opening my mouth to speak. “My name is Mara Hitchcock. I was born in New York, New York, on February 13th, 1993. My mother, Lea Hitchcock, died in childbirth. I never knew my father. My foster mother, Susan Carlisle, raised me from birth until I graduated in the heart of the city, when I got a scholarship to attend the Tisch School at New York University. Do you need me to slow down?”

I caught myself trying to get the words out as fast as possible, to get the dreaded truth out as fast as possible. Harry shook his head. “I know the key points, I think,” he said in a dark tone I couldn’t quite distinguish. “Just need help connecting the dots is all.”

Tears welled in my eyes from the embarrassment. He was mad, I could tell, and he had every right to be. I had lied to him. And then, drunkenly, chose to tell him the truth. Certainly he had wronged me by not clarifying his employment situation when I didn’t understand, but I had lied to him from the start. And even though it wasn’t my fault, I worried he wouldn’t understand.

“At Tisch, I did study film writing and wrote a million screenplays my freshman year,” I continued. “I made friends for the first time in my life, friends that lasted at least, especially my best friend Amelia. And met a guy, Thomas. I moved into my own apartment, though it was completely awful, it was better than paying to live in the dorms. Things were going well for the first time in my life.”

The words sounded surreal as they came out of my mouth.

“On the night of August 21st, Thomas broke up with me. He lived in Tribeca, and I needed to get on the Subway at Canal and take it to Alphabet City, where I live. Canal was a few blocks up from his place, so I had to walk – it was two in the morning and despite being Tribeca, nowhere in the city at night is particularly safe, as you can imagine. So when I was walking, I passed an alley, and that’s when I met Damien Trask for the first time.”

“This is much more coherent than when you told it the first time.”

“I’m glad I can indulge you in the truth,” I spat poorly, more towards my self than towards him. It was the first time I’d verbally relived the moments leading up to my brush with death since my testimony the day after it occurred. I could sense my throat closing a little at my words, fearful for everything that was yet to come. Talking about it out loud was almost as bad as living it the first time around. I was pouring salt in the wound and writhing around just for Harry to see.

But it had to be done.

“I could hear these voices coming from the alley, one fighting through tears to be brave and the other much more chilling,” I described, my blood running cold at the thought of it all. “It was dark, so I couldn’t see him very well. All I caught of the scene really was Eric, in the moments before he died and his body after Damien pulled the trigger and all the blood and brain matter. But under the streetlights he could apparently see me.”

It was like I was there again on that night, the humid August air seizing in my lungs as Damien lunged at me and pinned me to the concrete with the gun, still searing with heat, right to my chest and burning my skin like a wax seal. I couldn’t breathe at the thought of it, like the room was closing in on me. The apprehension in Harry’s posture melted away as instead he drew closer to me, wrapping his hand around mine in my lap, trying to steady it as it shook.

“Lilia,” he hummed softly before correcting himself. “Mara. You don’t have to tell me this part if you don’t want to.”

But I shook my head. Harry deserved to know the truth. All of it.

“He asked for my name,” I breathed, closing my eyes only to see the long, shaggy ends of his hair falling against my once tanned skin. “And he had me pinned to the concrete and there was nowhere to go. I kept praying that someone would have heard the gunshot and called the police, but things like that happen every once in a while and it was so late at night… I just kept praying that someone would come but no one did.”

I heaved a sob involuntarily when I tried to breathe, a few tears spilling out over my cheeks. “He spit on my face and demanded my name again,” I continued, trying to get ahold of myself while Harry squeezed my hand. “So I told him because there was no hope, I thought for sure he was going to kill me. I told him my name was Mara Hitchcock.

“And for whatever reason, that caught him off guard,” I sighed, shaking my head. “Maybe because he thought I was an FBI agent like Eric and when I wasn’t, he didn’t know what to do. Maybe because once he put a name to the face, he didn’t have the guts to kill me. I don’t think I’ll ever know, now. At any rate, I managed to bring my knee up and hit him just hard enough in the balls for him to keel over and leave him in pain for long enough that I could run the last block to the Canal Station just as the train was leaving. He chased me all the way to the station, screaming my name like he knew me. It was terrifying.

“But I managed to call the police once I got a few stops away, and they escorted me to the station for questioning and I told them everything. The profile I gave them matched Damien Trask’s, a suspected member of a high profile government hacking ring that Eric had been sent to investigate. When they found his body that night it confirmed it. Arthur Trask’s son was a murderer and I’d managed to escape him.”

“Oh my god,” Harry breathed, his green eyes wide. “You were the anonymous source the talked about in that article you played when we first started seeing each other.”

I nodded. “Since he was still at large, they thought it would be good to enter me into the program,” I finished, this time more steadily. “And with their hacking talents, I became a special case. So they sent me to the last place Damien would expect.”

I gave him a weak smile. “And then I met you.”

He gave me that same weak smile in return. “And then you met me.”

I managed to squeak out a few more tears through a laugh, leaning forward to rest my head on Harry’s shoulder. “God, I never wanted to lie to you,” I mumbled into his skin. “I never wanted to be your friend in the first place because I hated lying, I hated this place, I hated everything. And then you changed all that and I couldn’t tell you and I felt terrible the whole time.”

“What changed your mind?” he asked simply, running his long fingers across my hair.

I shook my head into the crook of his neck. “Damien’s dead,” I whispered. “They found his body in the Mississippi River delta. I don’t have to lie anymore to hide from him. I can have my life back.”

I paused for a moment, thinking of the implications of my next words. “I can go home.”

Suddenly, Harry pulled away from me. His face was wrought with concern and disapproval, not the reaction I was expecting. I was expecting him to be more than happy to wash his hands of me and my problems, to run away from the train wreck that was my life and never have to look back. But instead, he looked pained at the thought of my departure, lips once again pressed in that thin line.

“You’re really going to go?”

I paused again, thinking of all the things I had for me in New York. I could go back to Tisch and start writing again. I could be with Amelia again. I could go back to the city I’d grown up in.

Though, Tisch was a small school and Thomas was sure to be there, and I would have to deal with all of that mess all over again. And Amelia and I were sure to have changed, with everything that had happened. And New York, though being a city I loved, would certainly be haunted for me now. Everything had changed.

I started a life for myself in Holmes Chapel, with my job at the Old Red Lion and self-defense classes in Crewe. I made friends like Mary and the girls at the bar, who kept me busy and made me feel the least alone I’d ever felt. And Harry, oh god Harry. I nearly crumbled at the thought of leaving him.

“I already missed most of the semester,” I mused with a shrug and a few more tears. “And moving is such a pain, plus finding a new apartment after Hudson managed to sell it behind my back?”

I smiled at Harry, more strongly this time. “I think I can hang around while we figure this whole thing out. That is, if you want to figure this whole thing out.”

Harry smiled back, that same beautiful smile he gave me the night we met on that plane, when I was alone and scared and being thrust into a world unknown.

“It’s gonna take some time,” he hummed. “I need to get used to even calling you a fucking different name for starters… But you’re damn right I want to figure this whole thing out.”

So he kissed me, and everything was right again.