Chapter 25
Mia
We were twenty minutes from my apartment, and Lark was in the middle of a story about a horse that had bitten Beckett’s hat clean off his head. I was trying my best to listen.
“Just snatched it right off.” She lifted one hand to demonstrate. “Maverick’s got a thing about hats. We think his previous owner wore one when—well. That’s his story to tell, not mine. But Beckett just stood there looking so personally offended. Like the horse had insulted his grandmother.”
I laughed. It came out thinner than I intended.
The highway stretched ahead, mountains rising in the distance. But underneath Lark’s easy chatter, my mind kept circling the same impossible fact like water around a drain.
Coop was back under. No contact possible. No way to know if he was safe. Just this hollow ache of waiting.
The not-knowing had teeth. Sharp, painful ones.
“You’re doing that thing again,” Lark said.
“What thing?”
“The thing where you laugh but your eyes stay frozen.” She glanced over. “You haven’t really been here for the last twenty miles.”
I hadn’t really been here for any of the other miles either. I felt like I hadn’t been in my own body since Coop had left this morning. Which was why I’d asked Lark to come with me to get some more stuff from my apartment.
Anything was better than sitting around doing nothing.
I gripped the steering wheel tighter. “Sorry. I’m just—”
“Coop’s good at what he does,” Lark said quietly. “I know this isn’t his normal work, but he’s good at it.”
“I know.” The words felt inadequate.
We drove another few miles in silence. The landscape shifted from open highway to the outskirts of town, familiar landmarks sliding past. The grocery store where I’d bought my sad single-serving dinners.
The coffee shop where I’d edited photos surrounded by strangers, pretending their ambient noise was company.
I followed the familiar streets to my building. Three stories of beige stucco, practical windows, zero architectural personality. The kind of place you rented when you didn’t care where you lived, only that you had somewhere to sleep between jobs.
We climbed the stairs to the second floor. My keys jangled too loudly in the quiet hallway. I unlocked the door, pushed it open, and stepped inside.
My chest went tight.
Small. So much smaller than I remembered.
A couch I’d bought at a secondhand store because it was cheap, upholstered in a gray I’d never liked.
A kitchen with exactly enough dishes for one person, the cabinets half empty.
Walls bare except for a single photograph I’d taken of the mountains at sunrise—the one beautiful thing in the whole place, and I’d made it myself because no one else was going to.
This was where I’d spent the past few years of my life. Standing here now, with Garnet Bend still warm in my memory, I could barely recognize the woman who’d existed in these rooms.
“This doesn’t look like you.” Lark stood in the center of the living room, turning slowly, her eyes cataloging every sparse detail.
“It wasn’t.” I dropped my keys on the counter, the sound jarring in the stillness. “I was just existing here. Going through the motions. Working, sleeping, working again.” I ran my hand along the back of the couch, feeling the rough fabric. “I never bothered making it a home.”
Because home had meant something else. Someone else. And after I’d lost that, nothing else seemed worth the effort.
Lark didn’t push. She just nodded, that quiet understanding in her expression. She’d been through something too—I didn’t know the details, but I recognized the shape of old wounds when I saw them.
“Well.” She clapped her hands, breaking the weight of the moment. “Let’s pack up what we can fit.”
We started in the bedroom. I’d grabbed boxes from a storage place on the way, and we began the process of dismantling a life that had never really felt like mine.
It went faster than expected. I didn’t have much—a few years of accumulated possessions that fit easily into cardboard containers.
Clothes I barely remembered buying. Toiletries.
Camera equipment, most of which I’d already grabbed on my quick trip last week.
The furniture I’d get rid of another time.
“So what’s the plan?” Lark asked, taping a box closed with efficient movements. “Once you’re really settled in Garnet Bend? I mean, I assume you and Coop will be living together, but what about work-wise?”
“Photography, still.” I folded a sweater into the box I was packing. “But different from before. I’ve been thinking about what kind of work actually matters to me.”
“What kind is that?”
The idea was still new, still taking shape. “Survivors. People who’ve been through something terrible and found their way back.” I smoothed the sweater flat. “There’s beauty in resilience. I want to capture that.”
Lark’s hands stilled on the tape dispenser. Something flickered across her face—recognition, maybe. The look of someone who knew what rebuilding cost.
“That sounds exactly right,” she said. “Maybe you could include some of the Pawsitive animals as well.”
I was expecting her to press for more details, but I was glad when she didn’t. I didn’t have everything worked out just yet. I just knew something was forming in my gut.
We kept working. Kitchen, bathroom—it went fast. I’d never accumulated much.
I paused at the bookshelf.
Something felt off. It had since I’d walked in, but now I couldn’t ignore it anymore.
The apartment looked normal—same sparse furniture, same bare walls. Nothing obviously disturbed. And yet…
My fingers hovered over the book spines. Poetry, novels, photography books. I knew this shelf. I’d arranged it myself.
The Rumi collection was in the wrong place. Middle shelf instead of the far left. The Annie Leibovitz book had shifted two spaces down.
You’re being paranoid. You probably moved them last time and forgot.
But I always arranged them the same way. Always.
My gaze drifted to the desk. The drawer wasn’t quite closed—a quarter inch of shadow where wood didn’t meet frame. I never left it like that. Open drawers made me anxious. I always pushed them closed.
Paranoid.
I tried to believe it. I forced myself to breathe. I was high-strung because of Coop. There was nothing going on here.
The bedroom closet was the last stop. I pushed past winter coats, grabbed a pair of boots I actually liked, and reached up to the top shelf for the shoebox I’d kept tucked in the back corner.
Plain brown cardboard. Nothing special about it. But it held letters from when Coop was deployed. Ticket stubs from our first date. A pressed flower from the bouquet he’d brought me for our one-year anniversary.
I’d kept it where I wouldn’t have to see it every day, but I’d never been able to force myself to throw the stuff away. Now I was glad. I wanted to show all of it to Coop. To relive the memories with him.
I stretched up and reached for the familiar spot.
Nothing.
My hand swept across empty shelf. Just blank space where the box should have been.
That wasn’t right. Had I moved it? I didn’t remember moving it, but maybe I had.
I checked the other end of the shelf. Pulled down a box of old tax documents to see behind it. Dropped to my knees and looked under the bed, then the other closet, then back to the first one.
“Mia?” Lark appeared in the doorway. “What’s going on? What are you looking for?”
“A box.” I knelt and yanked open the bottom dresser drawers, knowing it wouldn’t be there, but checking anyway. “A shoebox. It’s always on that shelf. It’s been there since I moved in.”
“What’s in it?”
“It was where I kept stuff from when Coop and I dated before. It’s always been in the top corner of my closet, but now it’s not there.”
Lark knelt beside me. “Could you have moved it? Or maybe you threw it out and don’t remember.”
“No. I didn’t touch it.” My voice cracked. “I talked to my therapist about that box. She told me not to force getting rid of it—that I’d know when I was ready to let go. I wasn’t ready. I didn’t move it.”
“Could you have taken it to Garnet Bend? Maybe when you grabbed clothes last week?”
“No. I didn’t—” I stopped. Had I? The trip had been rushed. I’d been distracted, thinking about Coop, about where our relationship was going. Maybe I’d grabbed it without realizing.
No. I knew it hadn’t been in the things I’d unpacked at Coop’s. I would’ve known right away what it was.
“Hey, are you sure you didn’t throw it out? Maybe in a rough moment?” Lark’s voice was gentle. “Sometimes when we’re hurting, we do things and don’t remember—”
“I would remember throwing away six years of my life.”
Lark didn’t flinch at the sharpness in my voice. She just nodded and started checking places I’d already looked. Under the bed again. The hall closet. The kitchen cabinets, which made no sense, but she checked anyway.
I stood in the middle of the bedroom, watching her search, my mind running in circles.
The box was gone. It didn’t make sense. I hadn’t moved it, hadn’t thrown it away, hadn’t taken it anywhere. Boxes didn’t just vanish.
I froze. Unless someone took it.
The thought surfaced slowly, dragging cold dread behind it. The books out of order. The drawer slightly open. And now this.
Someone had been in this apartment.
My laptop sat on the desk, untouched. My backup camera was still in its case. The emergency cash I kept in my underwear drawer was exactly where I’d left it.
Someone had searched my apartment and taken only one thing.
The only thing that connected me to Ryan Cooper.
Oh no. Travis had been keeping tabs on Coop’s cover story to make sure it held if Oliver was digging deeper. But if Oliver had figured out who I was and come here…
“Oliver.” His name spilled out like poison.
Lark’s face went pale. “What?”