Page 22 of Tracking Safety

How had her life turned out like this?

She didn’t have an answer. She wasn’t sure she ever would.

With a frown, she checked the time. Fifteen minutes until he arrived.

She picked up her key, slid on her jacket, and went downstairs to wait.

With every step, she prayed this conversation would go well.

Luke had called his mother right after he called Jenna.

She answered on the second ring. He kept their conversation brief—he needed to go into town, could she come stay with the kids? Without asking a single question, she said she’d be there in twenty minutes.

That was his mother. She showed up, and she didn’t push. This morning Luke was more grateful for both those things than he could say.

As he stepped from his house, he paused.

A gray sedan drove by a little more slowly than usual.

Interesting. This wasn’t a road where many people got lost. His property was too out of the way.

The driver must have seen him because he sped up, zooming away before Luke could make out any of his features.

Was that just a coincidence? A driver who was honestly lost?

Or was this connected with the tension around Refuge Cove?

He had no idea. Most likely, he was reading too much into things.

At least, he hoped that was the case.

Because his life was already complicated enough without throwing any other problems into it.

Luke was on the road by seven-fifteen.

The drive from his place outside Charlottesville into Blue Ridge Hollow took just under an hour on a good morning, winding down out of the foothills and through the kind of Virginia countryside that looked like a painting in early spring. The mountains were still purple-gray in the distance, the fields along the road had gone soft and green, and dogwoods were beginning to bloom in the tree lines.

He’d been rehearsing this conversation ever since he’d called Jenna. He’d tried out questions, discarded them, tried others.

Why did you leave? Where have you been? Do you have any idea what you put us through?

None of them felt right. Yet all of them felt necessary. This time, he wouldn’t take “it’s a long story” for an answer. He wanted the truth.

He’d imagined this day more times than he could count. In the early days after Jenna had disappeared, he imagined it as a reunion. He imagined Jenna walking back through the door with an explanation that made sense, something he could understand and eventually forgive.

She must have been taken. That’s what he’d told himself. That she was hurt somewhere and unable to reach them. He’d called friends. Colleagues. Hospitals.

He’d driven the route she took to the grocery store looking for her car. He’d sat across from a police detective who was kind but not optimistic as he’d filed a missing person’s report.

In the end, he’d walked away feeling disoriented, like he’d been dropped into a land where he didn’t belong.

He’d done everything a man did when the woman he loved vanished without a trace. But all of it had gotten him nowhere.

Then the days turned to weeks, and there was no activity on her accounts, no sightings, no trail of any kind.

And then the text came.

It had been from an unknown number six weeks after she disappeared. He’d been putting the kids to bed when his phone buzzed. He’d read the message while standing in the hallway outside Liam’s room.