Page 75 of Undertow

“Okay, Mrs. Ellison,” Wade said, looking at Cara in the rearview. “Show us what you’ve got.”

Gabe, sitting beside her in the back seat, reached over and took her hand. His grip was warm and steady. A feeling she could get way too used to.

She looked at him.

“Breathe,” he said.

“You, too.”

That made him laugh. “For sure.”

Wade rolled out of the vehicle, straightening his jacket. “Let’s do this.”

A different receptionist manned the front desk. This one wore her hair in a smooth low bun and a smile that had been installed at the same time as the fresh flowers. She stood up when the three of them came through the door.

“Ms. Ellison,” she said, warmly, but it was recognition by file, not by face. “Welcome back.”

“Thank you.” The Ellison voice came back effortlessly—a little breathy at the edges, the cadence of a woman who carried a recognizable last name and had learned to carry it lightly. She introduced Gabe as her fiancé and Wade as their family attorney.

"Of course. I have you down for eleven with Dr. Meyers." The receptionist's fingers tapped her keyboard. Her smile flickered. The flicker was the tell. "Although—one moment. It looks like Mr. Whitfield has asked to greet you before your consult begins. He sits on our Foundation board, and he's on-site this morning. He likes to introduce himself personally when a family is considering the facility for someone they love."

"How thoughtful," Cara said.

Wade's jaw ticked. Nothing a stranger would read.

The receptionist led them down a hallway Cara had walked before, past abstract watercolors Cara had priced before, to a door Cara had not been through before. A private consult room. Leather chairs. A low table with a pitcher of cucumber water. A wall of windows overlooking the coastal gardens. Everything was calibrated to make a family with a recognizable last name feel at home. Cara sat. Gabe sat. Wade took the chair angled toward the door, which was the chair you took when you were playing the attorney but thinking like the security.

The receptionist closed the door behind her.

"He bit," Wade said quietly.

It was the possibility they'd built the day around. The Ellison name was bait Graham wouldn't leave sitting on the hook for long—if he was anywhere on the property, he'd find a reason to look in. They had planned for it. They hadn't known. Until now.

Her phone buzzed once against her thigh. Elena.

In. Heading to the room.

Cara slipped the phone back into her jacket. She did not smile. She arranged her face into the one Ms. Ellison wore when she was worried about David and grateful for the privacy of the facility and prepared to write a very large check. Gabe, beside her, had gone perfectly still—the still he went when there was work to be done and he was the man to do it. Wade watched the door.

They waited. Two hallways over, Elena would be escorting Tom toward the server room. Somewhere on the grounds, a set of FBI agents in an unmarked car was pretending to eat bagels and watch their phones.

Cara took Gabe's hand again. This time she didn't let go.

The door opened.

Graham Whitfield came through it wearing a cashmere sport coat and a sad smile, closing the door behind him with the easy authority of a man whose name appeared on the donor wall in the lobby and who was used to being deferred to in every room of this place. He looked at Wade, and Wade's manufactured boredom, and then at Gabe, and Gabe's cover-man stillness, and finally, with all the time in the world, at Cara.

"Ms. Sweet," he said. He couldn't help it. He wanted her to know he'd seen her from a mile off.

He sat down in the leather chair across from her and crossed one leg over the other. "So. Here we are."

41

"So. Here we are."

Whitfield settled deeper into the leather chair, as though the consult room were his living room and they were guests who'd arrived a touch early for dinner.

He poured himself a glass of cucumber water from the crystal carafe, took a measured sip, and set it on the leather blotter. His eyes moved from her to Gabe to Wade and back again with the patient amusement of someone who'd been expecting this exact room, these exact people, and had already decided how the conversation would end.