Page 18 of Undertow

Piper: Also tell Wade I left him trail mix in the basement. The good kind, not the weird healthy kind.

Wade glanced at her phone screen. “What kind of trail mix?”

“The good kind, apparently.”

He put the truck in gear. “I knew I liked that kid.”

Cara pocketed the phone and watched the harbor disappear behind them as they pulled onto the main road. Six AM tomorrow. Road trip. The coast highway, the facility, and a woman who’d chosen a January storm over one more night inside those walls.

Whatever they found up there, the quiet was over.

7

The station was too quiet. Nothing happened on most days, if Gabe was honest, but Fridays had a quality of stillness that made the clock on the wall sound like it was making a point.

He sat at his desk with a coffee that had gone lukewarm and the permanent chief position application open on his screen. The cursor blinked at the top of the first field. It had been blinking there for three weeks. He minimized it and opened the Elena Whitfield file instead, which was not an improvement in terms of his blood pressure but was at least interesting.

He checked his phone. Nothing from Cara. They’d left early—Cara, Wade, Tom, Reagan—coast highway north, Portland first, then the facility. By now they’d be past Salem. Maybe farther. Driving toward a private wellness center on the Oregon coast where a woman had vanished into a January storm, and he was sitting here watching a cursor blink.

He picked up the phone, put it down, and picked it up again. Nothing.

Cara was good at reading people. But being good at reading people didn’t make you bulletproof. And something about this case had edges he couldn’t see yet.

She was driving toward those edges right now. Without him. Because the badge on his desk meant he couldn’t get in that car.

Ellie Torres appeared in his doorway without knocking.

She leaned against the frame with her arms crossed and studied him. Ellie was too talented for a five-officer station in a coastal town, and they both knew it. She’d come to Haven Cove after her mother’s death, and she’d stayed because the town had a way of doing that to people—getting its hooks in gently, one potluck and one borrowed cup of sugar at a time, until you looked up and realized you’d stopped looking for the exit.

“Are you putting in for the permanent position?”

No preamble. No warm-up. That was Ellie.

“Still thinking about it,” he said.

She scoffed—with her whole face, an event that involved her eyebrows, her mouth, and a slight tilt of her head that communicated an entire paragraph of opinion. “It’s yours if you want it. And I want you to want it, to be clear.”

He looked at her. She looked back with the patience of someone who could outwait a glacier.

“You’re carrying something,” she said. Quieter now. “I don’t know what it is, but it’s been sitting on you all week. If you need to talk, I’m here.”

He didn’t. Couldn’t—couldn’t tell his best officer that the reason he was checking his phone every five minutes was because a team of civilians was driving toward a potentially dangerous situation on the Oregon coast, and the woman leading them was someone he had feelings about that he hadn’t named. Feelings that had started as professional curiosity and become something considerably less professional, and he was a man who’d built his career on the line between personal and professional, and that line was getting harder to find.

“I appreciate that,” he said. And meant it.

Ellie shifted gears with the ease of someone who knew when to push and when to leave a door open. “Charity potluck at the church Saturday night. Hendersons are organizing. Whole town.” She paused. “I’m bringing my grandmother’s empanadas. They took second at the Tillamook County Fair, which was a travesty, but I’m not bitter.”

“You sound a little bitter.”

“The woman who won used store-bought pastry dough, Gabe. Store. Bought.” She shook her head with the gravity of someone describing a federal crime. “Anyway. Saturday. You should come.”

The potluck. The Hendersons. Ellie’s empanadas and her righteous indignation about pastry dough. This town kept offering him a life, and he kept standing at the threshold with his hand on the doorknob, unable to decide whether he was coming or going.

“I’ll think about it,” he said.

“You should,” she said. And left.

The station settled back into its Friday quiet. Gabe looked at the minimized application. Looked at the Elena file. Looked at his phone.