Page 27 of Tracking Safety

“I’m with you.”

“Good.” His gaze locked with hers. “Do you know what that was about?”

She swallowed hard. Fears lingered at the edges of her mind—formless fears she’d been carrying so long they’d become part of the landscape of her thoughts.

She couldn’t tell him all those things. Not yet at least.

She shook her head. “No . . . I don’t think so.”

She wasn’t lying. Not exactly.

She didn’t know.

She couldn’t know.

The life she’d left behind was supposed to be finished, sealed off, and no longer her problem. She had no concrete reason to believe otherwise.

A sheriff’s SUV swung onto Main Street, light bar going, and pulled up alongside them.

Jenna exhaled.

She’d never in her life been so grateful to see law enforcement arrive.

Her emotions had been trying to claw their way toward the surface for the past several minutes. This interruption was the only thing stopping her from completely falling apart in front of Luke, which wasn’t how she had imagined this morning going.

She straightened and drew in a deep breath.

Jenna had known this would be hard. But it was even more difficult than she’d anticipated.

But she had no choice but to move forward.

CHAPTER 9

Micah stood with his notepad open and his pen ready. “Walk me through what happened.”

Luke kept his story straightforward. He went over where he and Jenna had been standing, the direction of the shot, the sedan pulling away east on Fourth. Jenna added that she thought she’d seen the sedan before, though she couldn’t be sure.

Micah wrote down all the details without looking up. Two deputies had already gone to check out the house on the corner of Main and Fourth. A third was working the street, talking to the woman who’d been on the opposite sidewalk when the shot fired.

Then Micah turned to Jenna. “Name?”

Micah, who was dating Naomi, didn’t know Jenna. Didn’t know about Luke’s history with her. But he was about to sense their unspoken past.

“Jenna King.” She said the words evenly, though her expression was still tense.

“How long have you been in Blue Ridge Hollow?”

“About a month.”

Micah’s pen slowed for a fraction of a second before he kept writing. “Any reason someone might want to take a shot in your direction, Ms. King?”

“No.” She met his gaze without flinching. “None that I know of.”

She was telling the truth. Or a version of it. Luke was becoming increasingly aware that Jenna understood the difference between those two things better than most people did.

He kept scanning the street. The sedan was gone. The deputies hadn’t radioed anything back yet, which meant the shooter had moved fast.

That shooting wasn’t random. That was someone who’d had a plan.