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Which made him think of another question. “Hey, Pete?”
The older man paused. “Yeah?”
“You said the commune was called The Free People when you were there. Did they change their name?”
His eyes flickered to Ellie with something like shame before he nodded. “After I left, heard they started calling themselves Hope’s Embrace.”
chapter
nine
“That can’t be a coincidence.” Ellie felt like she’d downed five espresso shots and then chased them with a Red Bull. She couldn’t relax enough to get into her car and drive home, so she did laps around it in the parking lot instead.
They finally, finally, after all these years, had a solid lead.
Cal leaned against the hood and crossed his arms in front of him, watching her pace. “Hope disappears, and at the same time, the cult starts to change? No, it’s not a coincidence.”
Ellie nodded and pressed a hand to her chest to keep her heart from trying to hammer out of her ribcage. “What if... what if Hope is still there? Still with them?”
“Except the girl said she’s missing.”
The girl.
God.
Hope’s daughter.
Ellie slammed to a halt at the reminder and swung around to face him. “She was raised there, wasn’t she? If Hope has been there all this time, then she’s never known life outside of the commune. She’s never known her family. Did Hope tell her about us? Did the cult convince her we abandoned her? We never would’ve left her there if we’d known! We didn’t know…”
Cal pushed off the car to stand in front of her. She didn’t realize how hard she was suddenly shaking until his hands landed on her shoulders, grounding her.
“Ellie.” His voice was gentle. “We don’t know anything for sure yet. We have leads, and we need to follow them before we start assuming.”
He was right. As always, he was the voice of reason when her thoughts were zooming by at breakneck speed, and her heart threatened to overtake her head. “We know she’s my niece.”
“Okay. We do know that for sure.”
She sucked in a deep breath and released it, feeling it carry away some of her frenzied energy. “We need to be smart about this, not just... run in screaming.”
A smile tugged at the corner of his mouth. “Exactly. We need more information and a plan.”
Okay. Right. Information she could do. It was kind of her whole life, after all. Now that they had a name for the commune, she’d dig up everything she could find on it.
She took a step back, out of Cal’s reach, and pulled out her phone, quickly typing into a search engine.
And there they were.
Just like that.
“They have a website,” she said incredulously. “It looks like they’re still active. They even have a contact number and an address.”
Cal leaned over to look as she scrolled through their homepage. “Wait. Go back.” He pointed. “What’s that?”
She scrolled back to the advertisement that had caught his eye and frowned at it. “It looks like some kind of couples retreat,” she said.
“For the low, low price of four thousand dollars.” His eyebrows winged up. “And here I thought they were against capitalism.”
“Apparently not against profiting from it.” She scanned the details of the retreat. It was a five-day immersive experience in ‘building trust and communication,’ whatever that meant. She shook her head and moved to scroll past it, but an idea struck. “What if...?”
