Page 47 of Tracking Safety

“Chamomile okay? It’s what I drink when I’ve had a day.” The young woman smiled. “I’m Emily. Just flag me if you need anything—I’ve got the whole back section today.”

“Thank you, Emily.”

The girl headed off toward the kitchen, and Jenna turned down the dim hallway toward the back of the restaurant.

That was when she smelled it.

Cedar and bergamot with something darker underneath it, something expensive.

She would know that cologne in her sleep.

It was Roderick’s.

Jenna stopped walking. Her hand found the wall.

The scent was gone almost before she’d named it. The hallway held nothing now but ordinary restaurant air—woodsmoke, garlic, the bleach tang of a recently mopped floor.

She pressed her eyes closed. Half the men in the world probably wear cedar-and-bergamot-scented colognes, she told herself. Someone had simply walked through this area with that cologne.

There were a hundred explanations, all of them more likely than the one her body had already leapt to.

Roderick was dead.

So why was she standing in a restaurant hallway with her pulse in her throat, certain—certain—that she’d just walked through the air he’d been standing in?

CHAPTER 18

Luke pulled out of the driveway and turned toward town, noting the rain clouds beginning to form in the distance.

As he drove, he let himself think.

He thought about Ellie Johnson, young and unknowingly married into the mob. He tried to square that woman with the one he’d met at a fundraiser in Charlottesville.

He thought about the years in between. Jenna making breakfast in their kitchen and humming softly to herself. Jenna in the delivery room, her hand in his, fierce and exhausted. Jenna at Sarah’s funeral, standing beside him, steady and quiet when he hadn’t been able to be either of those things himself.

Had any of that been real?

He turned that question over for several miles and arrived at the same answer every time.

It had been real.

Whatever name she’d been using, whatever secrets she hadn’t been able to tell him, the woman who’d stood beside him at his sister’s graveside and held herself together so he didn’t have to was real. He was certain of that.

He wasn’t certain what to do with the certainty.

The mountains flattened as he came down out of the foothills, the valley opening up ahead of him.

He’d driven this road so many times that he knew every curve of it without thinking. Today it felt shorter than usual, like the town came up to meet him faster than he was prepared for.

He came down the last long curve into town and turned onto Main Street.

He observed Blue Ridge Hollow a moment. The town had resumed its ordinary rhythms. Nothing indicated this street had been a crime scene earlier in the day.

He parked half a block from Ember & Oak and sat in the truck a moment looking at the restaurant. What had Jenna and Wes been talking about? Had anything changed?

He needed to rip off the Band-Aid and get this over with. He couldn’t delay these inevitable conversations any longer. Decisions had to be made.

After another moment, he climbed from the truck and walked toward Ember & Oak.