Page 27 of The SEAL and the Sheriff

“Your father would love to see him.”

Sarah pressed two fingers against the bridge of her nose. Outside her window, the November sky sat low and indifferent. “Dad sees plenty of other people.”

“Hudson used to help him in the workshop.”

“I know he used to help him in the—” She stopped, breathed. Recalibrated. Okay, Sarah, you’ve got this. “Mom. He’s busy. He has a case. It’s not a good time.”

Silence hummed on the line.

Not an empty silence. Sophie Meyer’s silences were never empty. This one had an armchair in it and a cup of coffee and her mother sitting waiting with all the patience in the world.

“Sarah.” Just that. Her name. “Why don’t you want him to come?”

Her eyes went to Hudson. He was listening to Walter now, head slightly tilted, with the attention that made whoever he was talking to feel like the only person in the room. She remembered that about him. It had persisted in some filing cabinet of her brain that she’d thought was locked and turned out only to be stuck.

The boy she’d known had disappeared somewhere along the way. The problem was she kept catching unexpected glimpses of him inside the man.

She looked away.

“I don’t not want him to come,” she said, and heard immediately how that sounded.

More silence. Fuller this time.

“Mom.”

“Mmm.”

That sound. Her mom had been deploying it since she was tiny, and it had never once failed to extract the truth from her. Today wasn’t going to be the exception.

“It’s not—” She stopped. Started again. “It’s complicated.”

Her mom’s smile was almost audible on the line. “Most things worth anything are.”

“That’s not—” Sarah pressed her lips together. Outside, Hudson had put his hands in his jacket pockets and turned slightly, automatically taking up a position where he could see the road, the lot, and the station entrance. The memory of how he caught her at the cannery arrived uninvited. Like most of her current problems.

She looked at the dashboard again.

“Fine.” The word came out more like a surrender than she intended. “Dinner. Friday. Seven o’clock.”

“Wonderful.” The warmth of her mom’s voice made it clear she’d never had any doubt about the outcome of the conversation. “Tell him I’m making the pot roast he used to like.”

“I don’t know what pot roast he used to⁠—”

“He’ll know. Bye, sweetheart.”

Her mom hung up.

Sarah sat with the phone in her hand and stared at nothing in particular for a moment.

She was the sheriff. She had a mountain of paperwork waiting for her, a federal marshal with too many secrets standing in her station lot, and a mother who played the long game with the skills of a global spymaster.

She got out of the truck.

Hudson turned at the slam of her door.

She crossed the yard toward him, stopped at a professional distance, meeting his eyes with the expression she usually wore before writing citations. “My mom wants you at dinner Friday.”

Surprise flickered across his face before the marshal returned. “Your mom?”