Page 52 of The SEAL and the Sheriff

And the whole time the truth had been a boy sitting in a truck two hundred yards down the road, unable to make himself drive away from what he’d just done.

It didn’t fix it. She refused to let herself pretend it did.

He’d still left. He’d still stood alone in the dark and decided what both their lives should look like. Knowing why didn’t give her those fifteen years back. It didn’t change the fact that he’d made the decision for both of them. Some stubborn part of her was still furious about that, and she wasn’t ready to let it go.

But both things were true. So she carried one truth in each hand for the rest of the morning, turning them over like smooth river stones.

One made her ache for him. The other refused to let him off the hook.

Mrs. Denver answered the door, very much alive and deeply offended that anyone had suggested otherwise. She slammed it before Sarah had finished explaining the welfare check.

Sarah gritted her teeth and headed back to her truck.

Yesterday.

It replayed differently now. The buckle caught before it struck steel.

Thirty seconds. Then fight me.

The shoelace she’d never noticed until he pointed at it.

She’d thought it was training. A man who noticed everything because missing things got people killed. She hadn’t been wrong, but she hadn’t realized she was one of the things he was noticing.

The memories rearranged themselves.

Quietly. Almost gently. As if somebody had handed her the missing page of a story she’d been reading wrong for fifteen years. None of it had been because he was flirting. It was because he’d been trying not to.

The distance he’d kept at the bar. The easy deflections at Benji’s. The hand that had lifted in the stables, then stopped before it reached her. It hadn’t been hesitation. It had been restraint. He’d been holding back since he was nineteen and had just gotten very good at it.

Which meant every careful step backward she’d spent three days resenting had probably cost him too. The corner of her mouth twitched. She tried to flatten it and failed. Honestly. He really was an idiot.

She drove back to the station, barely aware of anything but the road. Yesterday hadn’t changed the case. Cord was still missing. Time was still running out. There were still men out there willing to beat old fishermen to protect whatever they were hiding.

None of that had changed.

Hudson had. Or maybe he hadn’t. Maybe she’d just finally been allowed to see him properly.

He’d told her the truth. What she did with it now—that was hers.

22

Hudson was standing by the water cooler, cup in hand, barely listening to Statton talk about something that wasn’t landing. He couldn’t have repeated a word of it if she’d asked.

The station door opened.

Sarah.

Sunglasses pushed up into her hair, badge catching the pale afternoon light. Hudson was vaguely aware of his pulse refusing to treat this as a woman walking across a room in a department-issue jacket.

She spoke to Walter, something Hudson couldn’t track because all his attention had narrowed down to the fact that she was there. Walter peeled off to brief two other deputies.

Sarah smiled at Statton on her way past. She didn’t so much as glance in Hudson’s direction. Her office door closed behind her.

Hudson stood there a second too long, cup still in his hand, watching a door that had nothing more to show him.

He’d spent years measuring success by exactly one thing. Finish the mission. Go home. Now, some part of him wanted this one to last a little longer.

Because finding Cord meant finishing it. And finishing it meant there’d be nothing left tying him to Aurora Cove.