Page 38 of Undertow

He limped down the hall. The bedroom door closed quietly.

Cara sat in the empty kitchen. The tea was cold. The blanket smelled like someone else’s fabric softener.

She stood. Her ribs protested—a sharp, bright objection that took her breath for a second.

In the bathroom, she peeled off her jacket and her shirt. The mirror showed her what she’d been feeling: a bruise that covered her entire left side, shoulder to hip, deep purple shading to black along the ribs where she’d hit the slope. She touched it with careful fingers. The intake of breath was involuntary.

She turned on the faucet and cleaned the scrape on her forearm—gravel rash, shallow, the kind that stung worse than it damaged. The water ran pink. She watched it swirl down the drain and looked at her own face in the mirror. Wet hair. Pale skin. Dark circles she’d been carrying for a week.

Lord, we’re in over our heads. But Elena’s still out there. Keep us moving.

The prayer came without rehearsal, without the self-conscious negotiation that had characterized her early attempts at talking to God—the careful transactions of a woman who’d spent her whole life calculating what things cost. This was different. Simpler. A woman standing in front of a mirror with a bruise the size of a continent, asking for help. Not for herself. For a stranger in the rain.

19

The dryer was making a sound—rhythmic, percussive, the thump-thump-thump of something unbalanced—that Gabe ignored for twenty minutes because fixing it would require bending down, and bending down would require committing to the idea that this was how he spent his Sunday morning.

Laundry. In a house that smelled like dryer sheets and the coffee he’d made two hours ago and forgotten to drink.

The station was closed. Cho and Burkhardt were on call for emergencies, which in Haven Cove on a January Sunday meant Harold Bianchi’s rooster or Mrs. Sanderson’s wind chimes or, if the coast truly outdid itself, a fender bender at the harbor. Gabe had the day off. It stretched in front of him like a jail sentence.

On the kitchen table, next to the cold coffee: the permanent chief application. He’d printed it thinking the physical paper might make it feel more real, more like a thing you could pick up and do rather than a cursor blinking on a screen. It hadn’t worked. The paper sat there with the same patient blankness as the screen version, waiting for him to become the kind of man who filled things out.

He opened the dryer instead. Pulled out the towels. Started folding.

This was his life now. A small house on a quiet street in a town where the most dangerous thing was the weather. Two bedrooms—one he didn’t need. A kitchen he kept clean and a living room he kept spare and a garage where he’d been meaning to build shelves for six months.

He folded a towel. Folded another.

His phone buzzed.

Wade: Six words: We’re okay. Call when you can.

The towel in his hands went still.

We’re okay was what you said when the alternative had been on the table. And the text was from Wade—not Cara, not Tom, not the group chat. Wade, who communicated in complete sentences approximately twice a year.

He called Cara. She picked up on the second ring.

She gave him the debrief.

Gabe listened. Didn’t interrupt.

When she finished, he said: “When did this happen?”

“Last night. Around eight.”

He looked at Wade’s text. The math was simple. And unacceptable.

“Fourteen hours, Cara.”

Silence stretched. He could feel her choosing her words, which made it worse.

“We needed to regroup. Assess. I wasn’t going to call you at midnight with half the story and have you drive four hours on adrenaline and⁠—”

“And what?”

“Get yourself involved past what your badge can survive.”