She was extremely wary of me, and for good reason. I was part of a memory she probably wanted to bury.It took us only five minutes to reach the park. She picked the bench. We sat in the shade of a maple tree, the fountain rushing behind us. The playground was packed, and the sound of screaming kids put me on edge.Despite that, I pressed my back against the bench and took a deep breath and tried to act like I had my shit together.For the next twenty minutes, I told Elizabeth half truths. I told her about the flashback, the one in the woods, because that was something she’d already know anyway. I didn’t tell her much about the Branch, only the barest of details. I made her think that I’d been out of the Branch for a few years, that I’d been piecing together my past since then. I wanted her to think she was a trivial memory on a long list of heavy shit.I didn’t want her to know too much about me until I figured out why she’d been involved with the Branch in the first place, and why she’d been injured that night in the flashback.
