Reading [FanFic]
Title: Reading
Author: Tooks
Pairing: Hotch/OFC
Rating: FRT
Summary: So often people ask me about him because they want a good story to tell their friends or put in their paper or because they think talking to me is some…link to the legacy of The Boston Reaper.
Notes: Right so I was going along working on a bunch of different things when this suddenly jumped up and tackled me...then it sat in my brain until I wrote it down. Takes place shortly after Season 5's "Nameless, Faceless"...the title is Chapter 3 of Thoreau's Walden because it kind of fits and I couldn't find anything better for a summary that didn't give away the whole story. Not sure what to make of it all myself, but I'd be interested it hear what ya'll think, haha! ^_^
The woman pulled the tainted sponge out of bucket, wrung out the pink water, and returned to scrubbing down the side of her bookstore. This was the third time, THIRD, in two months that her shop had been vandalized. She could easily attribute it to Halloween, things always got wild as Halloween rolled around, but she knew that wasn’t it. Not with what was spray-painted.
“The Eye of Providence?” a stern, deeply male, voice questioned from above her.
She sighed. “No comment.” The reporters were almost worse than the vandals these days. People find out you dated one sociopathic serial killer who escaped from prison and suddenly no one’s willing to leave you alone.
“I’m not a reporter, Ms Byrne,” Aaron informed. “But I would like to speak with you.”
Julie tossed the sponge in the water so that it splashed up a touch before she slowly backed up on her haunches and stood. “I already spoke to the Boston PD and the Staties,” she told the man as she turned around.
She was a dish-water blond with eyes hazel and green mixed together. Aaron was surprised to find her both taller and more formidably built than he expected; George’s other women had been young waifs, those that seemed to reinforce his opinion of women as weak. This woman was a touch athletic, with small muscles running over her arms and no sight of the middle-age paunch many got. She wore cargo pants and a cut-up New England Patriots tee. Juliet Byrne did not appear weak. In fact, as she practically gave him the once-over, Aaron began to feel like he might be the weaker one.
He was dressed casually - blue jeans, a Polo shirt, fleece pullover, and some sneakers - but all of it was meticulously put together as an outfit. His stature was still severe and his face sad…lost almost. That was the look that kept him from being told off, what gave Julie a sense that whatever he had to say, ask, was out of some kind of desperation, and so she simply crossed her arms and waited.
“My name is, uh, SSA Aaron Hotchner,” Hotch spoke suddenly wishing he’d been in one of his most professional suits. He’d dressed down because he thought people, Ms Byrne, would be more open with him that way…and because, technically, he was off-duty. He was still on medical leave, still recovering from Foyet’s attack on him.
“And you wanna talk about George, right?”
So strange to hear someone call Foyet, The Reaper, George, just…George. It was jarring, threw Hotch off a moment, before he cleared his throat. “You’re the, uh, first woman I’ve located that had dated him. Survived dating him.”
Something in the way the agent put it made the woman smile. “You make him sound like a natural disaster or something.”
Hotch’s jaw twitched, but he didn’t respond.
“If you really want to discuss this I’d rather do it inside,” Julie moved on.
“That’s fine.”
***
The bookstore was just big enough to include a small area for tables and chairs where people could sit, sip coffee, and read. From what Aaron could surmise as he looked around this was a place, a store, that existed because of loyalty from the locals and maybe, just maybe, a little tourist curiosity.
“Would you like some coffee, Agent Hotchner?” Julie asked with a polite smile as she automatically stepped into friendly customer-service mode.
“Coffee or cappuccino?” Hotch asked with a slight lift of one side of his lips.
“Whichever you’d prefer.”
“Coffee, please.”
“Coming right up!”
Aaron began to examine the nearest shelf of books. Back-to-School Reading: Catcher in the Rye, Crime & Punishment, Lord of the Flies. “Harry Potter?” Hotch questioned as he lifted The Prisoner of Azkaban to show the woman.
Julie came around to one of the tables with the drinks and a smile. “They’re still pretty popular so, I guess, most schools have decided to roll with it. Better to have the students read something than nothing, right?”
Aaron set the book back down and headed towards the woman. “I suppose.”
“You don’t approve?”
“I just remember being made to read the classics, whether I liked them or not.”
“Ah, the good old days,” Julie cracked as the man settled into a chair opposite her. “So…you’re here to talk about George. What would you like to know, Agent Hotchner?”
Hotch sighed, he’d spent countless hours working on finding the woman, of all the ways she’d react when he told her who, what, he wanted to speak about, and now he was thrown by her actual reaction. She was so calm, so matter-of-fact, that he wasn’t quite sure how to proceed. “Um…first you can, well…You may call me Aaron, if you wish.”
“Aaron. You can call me Julie.” She never went by Juliet. She thought into her sip of coffee and set it back down before speaking. “You’re the one he attacked, aren’t you?” It’d hit the papers in New England too, everything Boston Reaper related did.
Aaron Hotchner looked down, a mixture of shame and memory welling up over his face, in his eyes. He said nothing.
“This isn’t, exactly, an official visit, is it, Aaron?”
The agent shook his head almost like a child before he sighed. “No. I’m...I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have made you think that,” the man started to get up. “I shouldn’t even be here really, I’m truly sorry Ms Byrne.”
“Sit down, Aaron,” Julie insisted, which got Hotch to stop and see her soft smile, but not sit. Not yet. “Sit down, call me Julie, and I’ll tell you whatever you’d like to know.”
“This is really unprofessional, I apologize,” Hotch restated even as he sat.
The woman shrugged. “At least you have good reason. So often people ask me about him because they want a good story to tell their friends or put in their paper or because they think talking to me is some…link to the legacy of The Boston Reaper.” She sipped her coffee as she sighed. “Their reasons are pathetic.”
Hotch gave a sad smile. “For me it’s just my approach, I suppose.”
“There’s nothing pathetic about what you’re doing.”
“Are you sure?”
“Yes.” Julie set her hand halfway between herself and him. “I’m sorry about what happened to you. How are you recovering?”
Aaron was grateful she’d asked a question he could answer honestly. “Fine,” he stated, setting his fingers over hers a split second before he pulled them back to his coffee. He sipped, then spoke. “I should be able to return to the field soon, which is a relief.” Because it might keep his mind on something other than his attack.
“If you ever get a chance, no matter how small, kill him.”
“Ms Byrne -“
“Julie.”
“Julie,” Aaron corrected himself with a polite smile that settled quickly into a serious, protective, look. “Was he…ever…abusive to you?”
“No, just manipulative, but we both know what he’s capable of and I know what he does to those he considers his rivals.”
“What’s that?” Hotch had his own answer, of course, but wanted to hear hers as he sipped his coffee once again.
Julie sipped her coffee in time. “When we went to school together there was a boy who set himself up as George’s rival of sorts. Called George out for cheating in sports, turned him in for having alcohol at a school event, that sort of thing. In the span of a week the boy’s car was stolen, his dog went missing, and he broke his leg on some ice on his stairs. The last part was especially odd considering it hadn’t rained or snowed in the past few days.”
“He likes challenges.”
“He likes destroying them,” Julie specified. “In the end that boy was expelled and arrested for having drugs in his locker...shocking considering he was as straight-laced as they came." The woman took another sip. "George was always into taking things apart. Locks, cars, animals, lives. He’d strip away the layers, the parts that held whatever he was working on together, until there was just the core left…and then he’d crush that.” She forced a smile of politeness. “If the papers were right you’re a, uh, FBI profiler so I’m sure you can tell me why that is better than I could you.”
Aaron seemed to examine the woman. “He didn’t destroy you.” She seemed smart, strong, independent…uncorrupted by The Reaper.
Julie chuckled. “He didn’t get a chance. I moved with my parents the end of my junior year so there was no opportunity for a messy, violent, break-up.” Which seemed to be how many of George’s other relationships ended.
“Was your relationship with him…normal?”
“For high school, I suppose. Like I said, he was never outright abusive or anything, just manipulative, but then so many teen boys are, aren’t they?”
“I wouldn’t know.”
“Well you were a teen boy once, weren’t you?” It was almost a playful tease.
“Yes, but,” Aaron smiled into the flushing of his face, “I’d already met my wife by junior year.”
“Oh, I see.”
The man tried to set the focus back on Foyet. “How was he manipulative?”
“How wasn’t he?” Julie cracked before giving a real answer. “Mostly it was just George seeing how far he could go, how much he could get away with, and what he could make you believe before you called bullshit on him.”
“Do you know if he killed anyone back then?”
“You mean other than his parents?”
Aaron brows arched and then knitted together. “His parents died in a car accident.” He’d already looked up the file on that incident; George's biological parents died in a car accident off the highway when he was nine and then the wealthy Foyet’s took him in after that.
Julie smiled a little, took an oversized sip of her coffee, and then set the mug down. “George told me a story once about that. His parents were in the front seat arguing, screaming at each other like they did, and George was seated in the back. He started to provoke his father, get the man to turn back and take swings at him and, when his father was good and distracted, George kicked him in the face with all his might. The man lost control of the car completely. It went down an embankment and hit a tree. George said his mother was pretty much dead when the car hit, but his dad he stabbed in the face a few times for good measure. Police were so stunned, baffled, in denial, that they just wrote it all up as the result of a car accident.”
“He told you this?” Aaron was stunned…not that George might’ve done that, but that he confessed it to someone.
“Boasted more like,” Julie nodded. “I was never sure if he was full of it or not so,” she shrugged, “I never mentioned it to anyone. But, afterwards, as you know, he ended up with the Foyets, which, if you look at it from his perspective, was like getting rewarded for murder. He went from an abusive home in the projects to an over-indulgent one where he summered on Nantucket and Martha’s Vineyard.”
“And so it began.”
“Looks like.”
***
They spent the afternoon hours over coffee letting their conversation move past The Reaper onto favorite books, the evils of reality TV, and whether or not the new state-themed quarters were worth collecting or not. When they discussed movies Julie joked about how, these days, everyone seemed to think Boston was full of geniuses and criminals and when The Beatles came up Aaron stood by his belief that John Lennon was at his best with the band than as a solo artist.
Julie set their cups on the counter to clean later as she let out a small laugh. “I’ll give you all of The White Album if you give me ‘Imagine’ and ‘Working Class Hero’.”
“Deal,” Aaron chuckled back before his memory caught him. You should have made a deal. All amusement, lightness, he’d picked up in speaking with Julie left him. His smile, then his whole face, fell. His body seemed to shrink in the burn of still healing wounds.
The woman sensed something was wrong and turned to the agent. She took a deep breath and gave a sympathetic look. “He’d have wanted to destroy you no matter what, Aaron.”
“How can you be so sure, Julie?” She wasn’t even aware of the deals Foyet offered so how could she know that, if he’d taken the deal, he wouldn’t at least still have his family, his son?
Julie walked over to him and smiled softly. “Because you’re better than him and he knows it.”
“Thank you.” Aaron wasn’t sure what else to say.
“It’s the truth.” Then the woman smirked a little and shrugged. “I would know.”
Aaron nodded as his smile returned. “Well, I should…get going, I’m afraid.”
“Big drive ahead.”
“Exactly.”
“You need anything before you go? A snack? More coffee?”
Aaron’s laugh returned. “No, anymore coffee and I won’t be able to sleep at all.”
“And the last thing you want is to be stuck in traffic after food and bunch of coffee, am I right?”
“Precisely,” Aaron laughed all the more.
Julie laughed some as she headed over to the shelf filled with Back-to-School books. “But you shouldn’t go without something…” she grabbed a book and then handed it to him with a smile. “Here, read this.”
“Walden by Henry David Thoreau?” Aaron gave her a skeptical look.
“It’s a classic and required read in these parts,” Julie explained.
“What’s it about?” He’d heard the name, but never read it.
“Stepping back, enjoying simplicity, the beauty of nature…life, how it’s lived and how it could be better lived. Read it.”
“Whether I like it or not?” Aaron teased a touch.
Julie smiled. “I think you’ll like it, Aaron.”
Aaron sighed a confession. “I haven’t read in ages, not anything beyond Goodnight Moon or a work document anyway.”
“It’s time that you start again.”
“Thank you.” Aaron looked up from the book at her. “How much is it?”
“Free of charge.”
“Julie, I couldn’t -“
“I insist.”
Aaron nodded a little as he looked back at the book once again. “Thank you,” he repeated. Then he looked up at the woman once more and dug a business card out of his pocket to give her. “If you ever need anything, feel free to contact me.”
“Ditto.” She smiled.
***
Aaron Hotchner drove back down to Quantico with Walden in the passenger seat. He flipped from his usual NPR station in search of music and smiled when “Imagine” came on.
When he arrived back home he did his customary lock check, alarm check, and apartment check before eating a small meal and going to sit on the couch. For a few moments he stared at all the files on George Foyet collected in boxes and piles over his table. Then he glanced down at the book given to him by Julie in his hand and smiled. He opened the book.
"When I wrote the following pages, or rather the bulk of them, I lived alone, in the woods, a mile from any neighbor, in a house which I had built myself, on the shore of Walden Pond, in Concord, Massachusetts, and earned my living by the labor of my hands only." ~ first lines of Walden by Henry David Thoreau
Read the follow-up, Visitors, here
Author: Tooks
Pairing: Hotch/OFC
Rating: FRT
Summary: So often people ask me about him because they want a good story to tell their friends or put in their paper or because they think talking to me is some…link to the legacy of The Boston Reaper.
Notes: Right so I was going along working on a bunch of different things when this suddenly jumped up and tackled me...then it sat in my brain until I wrote it down. Takes place shortly after Season 5's "Nameless, Faceless"...the title is Chapter 3 of Thoreau's Walden because it kind of fits and I couldn't find anything better for a summary that didn't give away the whole story. Not sure what to make of it all myself, but I'd be interested it hear what ya'll think, haha! ^_^
The woman pulled the tainted sponge out of bucket, wrung out the pink water, and returned to scrubbing down the side of her bookstore. This was the third time, THIRD, in two months that her shop had been vandalized. She could easily attribute it to Halloween, things always got wild as Halloween rolled around, but she knew that wasn’t it. Not with what was spray-painted.
“The Eye of Providence?” a stern, deeply male, voice questioned from above her.
She sighed. “No comment.” The reporters were almost worse than the vandals these days. People find out you dated one sociopathic serial killer who escaped from prison and suddenly no one’s willing to leave you alone.
“I’m not a reporter, Ms Byrne,” Aaron informed. “But I would like to speak with you.”
Julie tossed the sponge in the water so that it splashed up a touch before she slowly backed up on her haunches and stood. “I already spoke to the Boston PD and the Staties,” she told the man as she turned around.
She was a dish-water blond with eyes hazel and green mixed together. Aaron was surprised to find her both taller and more formidably built than he expected; George’s other women had been young waifs, those that seemed to reinforce his opinion of women as weak. This woman was a touch athletic, with small muscles running over her arms and no sight of the middle-age paunch many got. She wore cargo pants and a cut-up New England Patriots tee. Juliet Byrne did not appear weak. In fact, as she practically gave him the once-over, Aaron began to feel like he might be the weaker one.
He was dressed casually - blue jeans, a Polo shirt, fleece pullover, and some sneakers - but all of it was meticulously put together as an outfit. His stature was still severe and his face sad…lost almost. That was the look that kept him from being told off, what gave Julie a sense that whatever he had to say, ask, was out of some kind of desperation, and so she simply crossed her arms and waited.
“My name is, uh, SSA Aaron Hotchner,” Hotch spoke suddenly wishing he’d been in one of his most professional suits. He’d dressed down because he thought people, Ms Byrne, would be more open with him that way…and because, technically, he was off-duty. He was still on medical leave, still recovering from Foyet’s attack on him.
“And you wanna talk about George, right?”
So strange to hear someone call Foyet, The Reaper, George, just…George. It was jarring, threw Hotch off a moment, before he cleared his throat. “You’re the, uh, first woman I’ve located that had dated him. Survived dating him.”
Something in the way the agent put it made the woman smile. “You make him sound like a natural disaster or something.”
Hotch’s jaw twitched, but he didn’t respond.
“If you really want to discuss this I’d rather do it inside,” Julie moved on.
“That’s fine.”
***
The bookstore was just big enough to include a small area for tables and chairs where people could sit, sip coffee, and read. From what Aaron could surmise as he looked around this was a place, a store, that existed because of loyalty from the locals and maybe, just maybe, a little tourist curiosity.
“Would you like some coffee, Agent Hotchner?” Julie asked with a polite smile as she automatically stepped into friendly customer-service mode.
“Coffee or cappuccino?” Hotch asked with a slight lift of one side of his lips.
“Whichever you’d prefer.”
“Coffee, please.”
“Coming right up!”
Aaron began to examine the nearest shelf of books. Back-to-School Reading: Catcher in the Rye, Crime & Punishment, Lord of the Flies. “Harry Potter?” Hotch questioned as he lifted The Prisoner of Azkaban to show the woman.
Julie came around to one of the tables with the drinks and a smile. “They’re still pretty popular so, I guess, most schools have decided to roll with it. Better to have the students read something than nothing, right?”
Aaron set the book back down and headed towards the woman. “I suppose.”
“You don’t approve?”
“I just remember being made to read the classics, whether I liked them or not.”
“Ah, the good old days,” Julie cracked as the man settled into a chair opposite her. “So…you’re here to talk about George. What would you like to know, Agent Hotchner?”
Hotch sighed, he’d spent countless hours working on finding the woman, of all the ways she’d react when he told her who, what, he wanted to speak about, and now he was thrown by her actual reaction. She was so calm, so matter-of-fact, that he wasn’t quite sure how to proceed. “Um…first you can, well…You may call me Aaron, if you wish.”
“Aaron. You can call me Julie.” She never went by Juliet. She thought into her sip of coffee and set it back down before speaking. “You’re the one he attacked, aren’t you?” It’d hit the papers in New England too, everything Boston Reaper related did.
Aaron Hotchner looked down, a mixture of shame and memory welling up over his face, in his eyes. He said nothing.
“This isn’t, exactly, an official visit, is it, Aaron?”
The agent shook his head almost like a child before he sighed. “No. I’m...I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have made you think that,” the man started to get up. “I shouldn’t even be here really, I’m truly sorry Ms Byrne.”
“Sit down, Aaron,” Julie insisted, which got Hotch to stop and see her soft smile, but not sit. Not yet. “Sit down, call me Julie, and I’ll tell you whatever you’d like to know.”
“This is really unprofessional, I apologize,” Hotch restated even as he sat.
The woman shrugged. “At least you have good reason. So often people ask me about him because they want a good story to tell their friends or put in their paper or because they think talking to me is some…link to the legacy of The Boston Reaper.” She sipped her coffee as she sighed. “Their reasons are pathetic.”
Hotch gave a sad smile. “For me it’s just my approach, I suppose.”
“There’s nothing pathetic about what you’re doing.”
“Are you sure?”
“Yes.” Julie set her hand halfway between herself and him. “I’m sorry about what happened to you. How are you recovering?”
Aaron was grateful she’d asked a question he could answer honestly. “Fine,” he stated, setting his fingers over hers a split second before he pulled them back to his coffee. He sipped, then spoke. “I should be able to return to the field soon, which is a relief.” Because it might keep his mind on something other than his attack.
“If you ever get a chance, no matter how small, kill him.”
“Ms Byrne -“
“Julie.”
“Julie,” Aaron corrected himself with a polite smile that settled quickly into a serious, protective, look. “Was he…ever…abusive to you?”
“No, just manipulative, but we both know what he’s capable of and I know what he does to those he considers his rivals.”
“What’s that?” Hotch had his own answer, of course, but wanted to hear hers as he sipped his coffee once again.
Julie sipped her coffee in time. “When we went to school together there was a boy who set himself up as George’s rival of sorts. Called George out for cheating in sports, turned him in for having alcohol at a school event, that sort of thing. In the span of a week the boy’s car was stolen, his dog went missing, and he broke his leg on some ice on his stairs. The last part was especially odd considering it hadn’t rained or snowed in the past few days.”
“He likes challenges.”
“He likes destroying them,” Julie specified. “In the end that boy was expelled and arrested for having drugs in his locker...shocking considering he was as straight-laced as they came." The woman took another sip. "George was always into taking things apart. Locks, cars, animals, lives. He’d strip away the layers, the parts that held whatever he was working on together, until there was just the core left…and then he’d crush that.” She forced a smile of politeness. “If the papers were right you’re a, uh, FBI profiler so I’m sure you can tell me why that is better than I could you.”
Aaron seemed to examine the woman. “He didn’t destroy you.” She seemed smart, strong, independent…uncorrupted by The Reaper.
Julie chuckled. “He didn’t get a chance. I moved with my parents the end of my junior year so there was no opportunity for a messy, violent, break-up.” Which seemed to be how many of George’s other relationships ended.
“Was your relationship with him…normal?”
“For high school, I suppose. Like I said, he was never outright abusive or anything, just manipulative, but then so many teen boys are, aren’t they?”
“I wouldn’t know.”
“Well you were a teen boy once, weren’t you?” It was almost a playful tease.
“Yes, but,” Aaron smiled into the flushing of his face, “I’d already met my wife by junior year.”
“Oh, I see.”
The man tried to set the focus back on Foyet. “How was he manipulative?”
“How wasn’t he?” Julie cracked before giving a real answer. “Mostly it was just George seeing how far he could go, how much he could get away with, and what he could make you believe before you called bullshit on him.”
“Do you know if he killed anyone back then?”
“You mean other than his parents?”
Aaron brows arched and then knitted together. “His parents died in a car accident.” He’d already looked up the file on that incident; George's biological parents died in a car accident off the highway when he was nine and then the wealthy Foyet’s took him in after that.
Julie smiled a little, took an oversized sip of her coffee, and then set the mug down. “George told me a story once about that. His parents were in the front seat arguing, screaming at each other like they did, and George was seated in the back. He started to provoke his father, get the man to turn back and take swings at him and, when his father was good and distracted, George kicked him in the face with all his might. The man lost control of the car completely. It went down an embankment and hit a tree. George said his mother was pretty much dead when the car hit, but his dad he stabbed in the face a few times for good measure. Police were so stunned, baffled, in denial, that they just wrote it all up as the result of a car accident.”
“He told you this?” Aaron was stunned…not that George might’ve done that, but that he confessed it to someone.
“Boasted more like,” Julie nodded. “I was never sure if he was full of it or not so,” she shrugged, “I never mentioned it to anyone. But, afterwards, as you know, he ended up with the Foyets, which, if you look at it from his perspective, was like getting rewarded for murder. He went from an abusive home in the projects to an over-indulgent one where he summered on Nantucket and Martha’s Vineyard.”
“And so it began.”
“Looks like.”
***
They spent the afternoon hours over coffee letting their conversation move past The Reaper onto favorite books, the evils of reality TV, and whether or not the new state-themed quarters were worth collecting or not. When they discussed movies Julie joked about how, these days, everyone seemed to think Boston was full of geniuses and criminals and when The Beatles came up Aaron stood by his belief that John Lennon was at his best with the band than as a solo artist.
Julie set their cups on the counter to clean later as she let out a small laugh. “I’ll give you all of The White Album if you give me ‘Imagine’ and ‘Working Class Hero’.”
“Deal,” Aaron chuckled back before his memory caught him. You should have made a deal. All amusement, lightness, he’d picked up in speaking with Julie left him. His smile, then his whole face, fell. His body seemed to shrink in the burn of still healing wounds.
The woman sensed something was wrong and turned to the agent. She took a deep breath and gave a sympathetic look. “He’d have wanted to destroy you no matter what, Aaron.”
“How can you be so sure, Julie?” She wasn’t even aware of the deals Foyet offered so how could she know that, if he’d taken the deal, he wouldn’t at least still have his family, his son?
Julie walked over to him and smiled softly. “Because you’re better than him and he knows it.”
“Thank you.” Aaron wasn’t sure what else to say.
“It’s the truth.” Then the woman smirked a little and shrugged. “I would know.”
Aaron nodded as his smile returned. “Well, I should…get going, I’m afraid.”
“Big drive ahead.”
“Exactly.”
“You need anything before you go? A snack? More coffee?”
Aaron’s laugh returned. “No, anymore coffee and I won’t be able to sleep at all.”
“And the last thing you want is to be stuck in traffic after food and bunch of coffee, am I right?”
“Precisely,” Aaron laughed all the more.
Julie laughed some as she headed over to the shelf filled with Back-to-School books. “But you shouldn’t go without something…” she grabbed a book and then handed it to him with a smile. “Here, read this.”
“Walden by Henry David Thoreau?” Aaron gave her a skeptical look.
“It’s a classic and required read in these parts,” Julie explained.
“What’s it about?” He’d heard the name, but never read it.
“Stepping back, enjoying simplicity, the beauty of nature…life, how it’s lived and how it could be better lived. Read it.”
“Whether I like it or not?” Aaron teased a touch.
Julie smiled. “I think you’ll like it, Aaron.”
Aaron sighed a confession. “I haven’t read in ages, not anything beyond Goodnight Moon or a work document anyway.”
“It’s time that you start again.”
“Thank you.” Aaron looked up from the book at her. “How much is it?”
“Free of charge.”
“Julie, I couldn’t -“
“I insist.”
Aaron nodded a little as he looked back at the book once again. “Thank you,” he repeated. Then he looked up at the woman once more and dug a business card out of his pocket to give her. “If you ever need anything, feel free to contact me.”
“Ditto.” She smiled.
***
Aaron Hotchner drove back down to Quantico with Walden in the passenger seat. He flipped from his usual NPR station in search of music and smiled when “Imagine” came on.
When he arrived back home he did his customary lock check, alarm check, and apartment check before eating a small meal and going to sit on the couch. For a few moments he stared at all the files on George Foyet collected in boxes and piles over his table. Then he glanced down at the book given to him by Julie in his hand and smiled. He opened the book.
"When I wrote the following pages, or rather the bulk of them, I lived alone, in the woods, a mile from any neighbor, in a house which I had built myself, on the shore of Walden Pond, in Concord, Massachusetts, and earned my living by the labor of my hands only." ~ first lines of Walden by Henry David Thoreau
Read the follow-up, Visitors, here