Needed By The Highlander - Rebecca Preston Page 0,1

for the police force — it was a kind of freelance, privatized police work. For Helen, the motivation was a lot more complex. She hadn’t started her career as a private investigator, or as a cop. No, Helen had gone straight from high school — where a few very specialized recruiters had noticed her knack for problem-solving and data analysis — into training as a criminal analyst for the FBI.

It had been a horrific and exhausting few years. She’d been completely out of her depth and overwhelmed — there was so much pressure on her to succeed, and not just from the FBI. For her family, the idea of their daughter holding down such a prestigious — and well-paying — job was absolutely huge. The Washingtons had never been well-off. Her father Gary was a mechanic, and her mother May had worked odd jobs for a long time to make ends meet… but a cancer diagnosis when Helen was still in high school had put an end to that. Their home life, never particularly financially stable, had become a storm of medical bills and stress, with their father taking on as much work as he could to keep food on the table and a roof over their heads. It was some respite that they owned their home, a creaky old four-bedroom that had been in dire need of renovation since the 1950s — but still, with four children to feed, Helen had been feeling the pressure to get her independence and start helping to support her family since she was a child.

So when this offer of a steady government job fell into her lap, it was a no-brainer. She had to take it. And so, her twenties had been claimed by a storm of paperwork and red tape. She learned quickly that work at the Bureau wasn’t just about how good you were at investigation… that was only the tip of the iceberg. After a certain point, progressing in your career — getting the kinds of pay raises that would help keep your family out of the poor house, for example — necessitated playing the kinds of political games that had never come easily to Helen. She’d done her best, for her mother’s sake — medical bills were medical bills, and cancer had no interest in whether or not you could afford to keep fighting it — but the job had burned her out from the inside, leaving her an empty husk by the time she turned thirty. There was no work-life balance at all, no way of having a life outside the Bureau. What was the point of having such a prestigious job if she had nobody to brag to about it? No friends, no social life, absolutely no romantic prospects beyond a couple of half-secret crushes on coworkers that had never gone anywhere.

Then, when Helen was thirty, her mother finally lost her battle to cancer. After the funeral, somehow, she never quite felt the same at work. Without her mother’s health to work for, without the safety and security of her family depending on her (all her younger siblings had moved out by this time and gotten on with their lives) she had realized, in a rush, that she was wasting her life as a cog in a machine that was more than willing to chew her up and spit her out. She wanted more to show for her life than just a hollow series of bureaucratic accomplishments. She wanted to be back in the world, helping real people… free of all the red tape, able to make a real difference.

So, frightened but resolute, at thirty, Helen Washington had handed in her notice and started a whole new life.

Getting a license to work as a private investigator had been easy as pie, especially after all the rigmarole she’d gotten accustomed to back at the Bureau. It had made sense, as a career shift… for all that her father fretted about it being dangerous and unreliable. She had a suspicion he was feeling a little lost. With her mother gone, and all of her siblings moved out, he was at something of a loose end. Though he was old enough to retire, he was still working at the mechanic shop he’d been at since he was a teenager, his careful hands servicing new models of car every year. At least with a little of the financial weight lifted with her mother’s passing (what an awful way to think about