It was the first time, in a very long time, that anything had been waiting for him to come home. He gave Walter a grateful and wistful scritch behind his ear.
“It’s you and me, Bud. A couple of beat up old bachelors.”
9
The kitchen smelled like the day-old coffee Grace had forgotten in the pot Sunday night and started reheating without noticing what she was doing because she’d barely slept last night. She stood at the counter in her bathrobe, old slippers, and glasses because her eyes were too gritty to deal with contact lenses this morning.
Outside, the lake was flat, gray, almost violet at the edges and the mountains across the lake were still vague black silhouettes against a slightly less black sky. The cat was an orange lump, asleep on the back of the porch sofa right under the kitchen window. The microwave oven clock said it was four-fifty-three in the morning.
She’d spent a good chunk of last night pondering how Reno Steele’s presence in her life had not been a decision, exactly, so much as he had moved in the way water moved around a rock, slowly, patiently, finding every crack she’d thought was solid and was not. And one of those cracks was located dangerously near her heart.
She’d thought herself to be immune to loving anyone else after Liam. Granted, she wouldn’t describe herself as in love with Reno, but she definitely had feelings for him. Romantic ones. And she had no idea what to with them. Liam had been a fact in her life since she was so young that she had no memory of falling in love with him. She’d just always loved him.
Odd how at almost thirty years of age, having been married and widowed, she was actively developing feelings for a man for the first time. How come none of the WoWS had ever warned her how scary it was to have these feelings?
She’d given up on getting any more sleep around two in the morning and got up. She’d come downstairs to go through Liam’s mother’s cookbooks that she’d swung by the bakery yesterday afternoon to pick up and bring home. The sheriff wanted her to go through them and try to find something to explain the would-be intruder at the bakery.
She poured herself a cup of the day-old coffee, which tasted terrible but she drank anyway, and she sat down at the kitchen table with the bread book. She’d already gone through the general cookbook and a dessert cookbook.
Liam's mother had written For Liam, who only liked the lemon ones on the title page in a long careful hand. Liam's mother had died when Liam was thirteen. Grace had known her nearly as well as her own mother. She and Liam were always together at one of their houses, and the two mothers had raised both of them as their own. When his mom passed, her mom had seamlessly become Liam’s second mom.
She found notes in the margins of nearly every page in Liam's mother's hand. Use less salt. Real lemons or none. Liam likes these for his birthday. She found a recipe for buttermilk biscuits with the word Fern's underlined beside it.
She found another one with a note in a different hand—Liam's block print—that said good as written. She put her hand flat on the page the way she used to lay her hand on his chest to feel him breathing beside her in bed. She inhaled shakily as a wave of grief rolled ashore in her heart. She concentrated on breathing until it retreated and turned the page.
Between the recipe for a country white loaf and the recipe for cinnamon pull-apart bread, she found a folded piece of paper.
It had been torn out of a pocket-sized pad and had a ragged top. The paper was dirty and creased, and the words on it were in Liam's handwriting.
Grace's stomach dropped with the same lurch she got when she walked off a step she had not seen coming. When he came home from SEAL missions, he used to have pieces of paper just like this in his pockets and stuffed in his duffel bag. He always gathered them up and burned them in the kitchen sink, then washed the ashes down the drain. She knew most of his work was classified, so she’d never asked him what was written on those cryptic notes of his.
She unfolded the paper carefully.
There were two words and two dates written on it.
The first word was Vela.
Grace stared at it as the part of her mind that was shocked into stillness waited for the part of her mind that stored memory to catch up.
Sam Vela had been Liam's swim buddy in the SEALs. He’d been the best man at their wedding and wore dress whites that Grace's mother called the most beautiful thing she’d ever seen on a man. The remark embarrassed Sam so thoroughly that Liam had teased him about it for the rest of his life.
Sam had stood at Liam's funeral and put a small folded paper into the coffin that nobody had asked him about and nobody had asked to read. He sent Grace a card every Christmas, with a hand-written note that was the same every year: Liam's people are my people. Call any time.
She knew he lived in Virginia Beach now, and that he worked for some part of the Navy whose name was classified.
She read the second word on the page again.
Tigris.
She had no idea what that meant.
The dates were June fourteenth and July second, the same summer Liam died. The fire was in August of that year.
She knew with absolute certainty that Liam had been working on something in the last weeks of his life that had nothing to do with this town or anyone in it. And she knew it had to do with the part of his life he’d brought home from the Navy and had never quite put down.
He’d never mentioned it to her let alone shared any details with her. The only reason she was aware of it was because she’d known him since he was six years old and had an unerring instinct for when he was keeping a secret from her.
She got her phone out and took photographs of the paper, front and back. She folded the paper back the way she’d found it, slid it between the same two recipes, and closed the book.
