Page 98 of Tracking Safety

A sound came out of Jenna that was almost a laugh, almost something else entirely. “It really is.”

He stood up and, without making anything of it, leaned against her arm the way he used to when he was small—just for a second.

Then he straightened and looked at his dad. “Can we have hot chocolate?”

“Yeah.” Luke’s voice came out a little rough. “Yeah, we can do that.”

Liam went inside, letting the screen door close quietly behind him, and the night settled back around them.

Jenna stood very still.

Luke didn’t say anything. There was nothing to say that the moment hadn’t already said for itself.

She reached down and laid her hand on Freya’s head again.

For the first time since she’d come through that gate, she let herself hope that some things, given enough time and a steady hand, could be coaxed back.

CHAPTER 40

Saturday came in clear and bright, like the weather hadn’t gotten the message about the rest of their lives.

Luke had already run back to his house near Charlottesville to grab some clothes and toiletries for him and the children. He was back by eight, and he was at the cottages by eight-thirty with a pry bar, a box of shims, and the need to fix at least one thing in his world. His crew didn’t work weekends, which suited him fine. He wanted the plain, repetitive work of setting a door frame right—something he could measure, something that would be square when he finished.

A distraction.

He pulled the splintered casing off the second cottage and started fitting the new one.

Behind him, the property woke up. Eventually, the screen door banged. Cora’s voice carried across the yard, narrating something to anyone who’d listen and several who wouldn’t. The chickens started up, and Hamilton started in on the chickens, and Caleb told Hamilton to leave the chickens alone.

By every appearance, it was an ordinary morning.

That was the strangest part—how ordinary it looked. The danger was real and close, and the morning had the nerve to look like peace anyway.

He decided, for the length of one Saturday morning, to let it.

He set a shim, checked the level, tapped it home.

When he straightened for another, he caught sight of Jenna.

She sat on the back porch steps with Cora between her knees, working a French braid into their daughter’s dark hair. Cora held unnaturally still—a small miracle—while Jenna’s fingers moved through the strands with the same unhurried patience she’d always had. Jonah crouched on the step below, holding something cupped in his hands for her to admire, and Jenna studied it with complete seriousness.

Two of his three. Luke’s eyes moved over the yard for the third and didn’t find Liam. He was probably inside.

A few feet from the steps, at the edge of things where she always kept herself, lay Freya.

The dog hadn’t let any of them close. Luke had tried more than once—crouched, offered his hand, gotten nothing but those pale, measuring eyes. Yet there she was, stretched out an arm’s length from Jenna with her head on her paws.

The canine watched the children with something that wasn’t trust yet. But it was closer than she’d ever come for him.

Luke stood there with the pry bar in his hand and looked at the woman and the wary dog and two of his children, all of them gold in the morning light. Something turned over in his chest that he’d spent months and months refusing to feel.

Hope.

He made himself go back to the door frame before the emotion could grow any larger.

“You need help?”

He looked up. Liam stood at the corner of the cottage, his hands in his pockets as he watched Luke work.