Page 39 of Undertow

That stopped him. Because she was right. And because the reason she hadn’t called wasn’t carelessness or oversight—it was protection. She was protecting him. The same way he’d been trying to protect her from two hundred miles south. He recognized his own logic coming out of her mouth—weaponized and precise and completely reasonable—and hated every word of it.

He walked to the front door. Opened it. Stepped onto the porch with the phone still pressed to his ear and nothing useful to say.

Across the road, the tree line was a wall of green and gray, mist threading through the Douglas firs.

"Gabe?" Her voice. Careful.

"Yeah."

"Say something."

"I'm trying to figure out which part to be angry about first."

He walked back inside. A cop in his kitchen. Warm towels in a basket. A job application he couldn't fill out. And the woman he⁠—

He stopped that thought. Rerouted.

"I should have been there," he said.

A beat. She knew it.

Silence stretched. Not the awkward kind. The kind that had weight—the accumulated mass of months of morning coffee and conversations that went to the edge and stopped.

He breathed into the phone. “You’re sure you’re okay?”

“I’m okay.”

They sat in the silence a second too long. Then she disconnected. He stood in his kitchen holding the phone and the ache of a conversation that had ended before the important part.

He pushed the application aside, opened his laptop, and went to work.

The trailhead. Mile marker 47. He ran it through every system he had access to—incident reports, traffic cameras, anything flagged within five miles. Nothing. No reports filed. No cameras. No record that anything had happened in that parking lot last night. The spot had been chosen precisely because it was a dead zone.

But he cross-referenced the location with the vehicle data from Pirelli’s crashed car, and a pattern emerged. Multiple vehicles had been running the coast road corridor between Pacific Crest and the crash site over the past week. Different makes, different plates, but the same stretch of road, the same hours. A systematic search. Whoever held the burner phone wasn’t just calling Pirelli. They were running their own parallel hunt for Elena.

Two groups searching the same coast for the same woman.

His phone buzzed again.

Piper: Need you at the bakery. NOW.

Gabe’s hand tightened on the phone. He texted back.

Is Diane with you?

Three dots. The longest three dots of his life.

Piper: Yes.

On my way.

He drove too fast. Six minutes. Sugar & Salt’s front window glowed warm against the gray day—the display case lit, the OPEN sign glowing, the bakery empty this late on a Sunday. He parked crooked and took the steps two at a time.

Piper waited behind the counter, arms crossed, face white. Not crying—past that, into something harder and more frightening.

Diane stood beside her, one hand on Piper’s shoulder. Her other hand gripped the edge of the counter hard enough to blanch her knuckles.

They were both staring at something on the marble counter, next to the big ceramic bowl of flour Diane used for the morning prep. An envelope. Plain. White. No stamp. No return address. It looked clean and ordinary and wrong.