Page 7 of Undertow

The air between them shifted. She held his gaze a beat longer than usual, something moving through her expression that he couldn’t quite name — recognition, maybe, or something that wanted to be and wasn’t ready yet.

Then Agent jumped onto the counter between them with the timing of a professional chaperone and headbutted Cara’s hand.

“Off the counter,” she told the cat, and the moment passed.

From the back room, with suspicious convenience, Piper called out: “Hey, Cara? Can you come look at the pastry case? The latch is doing the thing again.”

“It’s fine,” Cara called back.

“It’s really not. It’s a whole thing. You should come see.”

Cara gave Gabe a look that said she understood perfectly well what was happening. He kept his expression neutral. She pushed off the counter and went through the kitchen door.

Gabe sat in the warm, quiet bakery with his coffee and the cat, who had relocated to the stool beside him and purred with considerable satisfaction. Outside the front window the January rain fell on the empty sidewalk, and the streetlights had come on, and Haven Cove was doing its most convincing impression of a town where nothing ever happened.

He thought about what she’d said once, weeks ago, after the Blaire Mitchell case: that she knew what it was like when the system failed you. He’d filed it away. He had a whole file on things Cara Sweet had said that opened doors she immediately closed again. The copper pipe by the back door that wasn’t there for decoration. The moment, two cases ago, when she’d read a room faster than anyone he’d worked with in fifteen years at the Bureau.

He wasn’t going to run her prints. He’d told his brother that and he’d meant it. Whatever she was running from, she was the person he knew her to be — steady, capable, good where it mattered. He’d built a career on reading people and he trusted that read.

But he wondered, sometimes, what it would take for her to trust him back. Whether there’d come a point where she’d decide the distance cost more than it protected. Whether he’d be there when she did.

He was still thinking about it when Cara came back through the kitchen door, Piper close behind her, the cat draped over her shoulder like a relaxed scarf.

Gabe drained the last of his coffee and stood. “I should let you close up.”

“You don’t have to⁠—“

“I’ve got the Sanderson follow-up to file.” He put on his jacket. “Vital documentation. Wind chime threat level assessment.”

“High,” Piper said gravely. “Critical.”

Cara walked him to the door, which was not a thing either of them had formally established as the routine, but had become one anyway. He stepped out onto the wet sidewalk and turned up his collar. She stood in the warmth of the doorway, the light behind her.

“The paperwork’ll still be there tomorrow,” she said.

“It will.”

“Haven Cove’s not a bad place to land.”

It was, he thought, the closest she’d come in six months to saying something she actually meant.

He turned and started toward the station, rain on his shoulders.

He was four steps out when his phone buzzed.

He almost let it go to voicemail. Then he glanced at the screen.

Tyler Price. Not a text. Live call. Which meant it wasn’t going away.

Gabe stepped under the hardware store awning across the street, out of the worst of the rain, and answered.

“Yo, Gabe.” Price’s voice had the careful warmth of a man who’d been practicing this conversation. “The council chair tells me your application hasn’t landed in his inbox yet. What gives? You thinking about moving on?”

Gabe looked up at the rain running off the awning in thin silver lines.

The honest answer was that he knew exactly why the paperwork kept sitting there, cursor blinking, waiting for him to be decisive about his own life. It wasn’t Philadelphia. It wasn’t the Bureau, or the pension, or the difference between interim and permanent. It wasn’t even the rooster.

It was that he was standing in the rain outside a bakery at closing time on a Tuesday for no professional reason whatsoever, and the question underneath the question — the one he hadn’t let himself finish — was whether any of this made sense without Cara.