Chapter 9
The kitchen smelled like the day-old coffee Grace had forgotten in the pot Sunday night and started reheating without noticing what she was doing because she’d barely slept last night.
She stood at the counter in her bathrobe, old slippers, and glasses because her eyes were too gritty to deal with contact lenses this morning.
Outside, the lake was flat, gray, almost violet at the edges and the mountains across the lake were still vague black silhouettes against a slightly less black sky.
The cat was an orange lump, asleep on the back of the porch sofa right under the kitchen window.
The microwave oven clock said it was four-fifty-three in the morning.
She’d spent a good chunk of last night pondering how Reno Steele’s presence in her life had not been a decision, exactly, so much as he had moved in the way water moved around a rock, slowly, patiently, finding every crack she’d thought was solid and was not.
And one of those cracks was located dangerously near her heart.
She’d thought herself to be immune to loving anyone else after Liam.
Granted, she wouldn’t describe herself as in love with Reno, but she definitely had feelings for him.
Romantic ones. And she had no idea what to with them.
Liam had been a fact in her life since she was so young that she had no memory of falling in love with him. She’d just always loved him.
Odd how at almost thirty years of age, having been married and widowed, she was actively developing feelings for a man for the first time. How come none of the WoWS had ever warned her how scary it was to have these feelings?
She’d given up on getting any more sleep around two in the morning and got up.
She’d come downstairs to go through Liam’s mother’s cookbooks that she’d swung by the bakery yesterday afternoon to pick up and bring home.
The sheriff wanted her to go through them and try to find something to explain the would-be intruder at the bakery.
She poured herself a cup of the day-old coffee, which tasted terrible but she drank anyway, and she sat down at the kitchen table with the bread book. She’d already gone through the general cookbook and a dessert cookbook.
Liam's mother had written For Liam, who only liked the lemon ones on the title page in a long careful hand.
Liam's mother had died when Liam was thirteen. Grace had known her nearly as well as her own mother. She and Liam were always together at one of their houses, and the two mothers had raised both of them as their own. When his mom passed, her mom had seamlessly become Liam’s second mom.
She found notes in the margins of nearly every page in Liam's mother's hand. Use less salt. Real lemons or none. Liam likes these for his birthday. She found a recipe for buttermilk biscuits with the word Fern's underlined beside it.
She found another one with a note in a different hand—Liam's block print—that said good as written.
She put her hand flat on the page the way she used to lay her hand on his chest to feel him breathing beside her in bed.
She inhaled shakily as a wave of grief rolled ashore in her heart.
She concentrated on breathing until it retreated and turned the page.
Between the recipe for a country white loaf and the recipe for cinnamon pull-apart bread, she found a folded piece of paper.
It had been torn out of a pocket-sized pad and had a ragged top. The paper was dirty and creased, and the words on it were in Liam's handwriting.
Grace's stomach dropped with the same lurch she got when she walked off a step she had not seen coming. When he came home from SEAL missions, he used to have pieces of paper just like this in his pockets and stuffed in his duffel bag. He always gathered them up and burned them in the kitchen sink, then washed the ashes down the drain. She knew most of his work was classified, so she’d never asked him what was written on those cryptic notes of his.
She unfolded the paper carefully.
There were two words and two dates written on it.
The first word was Vela.
Grace stared at it as the part of her mind that was shocked into stillness waited for the part of her mind that stored memory to catch up.
Sam Vela had been Liam's swim buddy in the SEALs. He’d been the best man at their wedding and wore dress whites that Grace's mother called the most beautiful thing she’d ever seen on a man. The remark embarrassed Sam so thoroughly that Liam had teased him about it for the rest of his life.
Sam had stood at Liam's funeral and put a small folded paper into the coffin that nobody had asked him about and nobody had asked to read. He sent Grace a card every Christmas, with a hand-written note that was the same every year: Liam's people are my people. Call any time.
She knew he lived in Virginia Beach now, and that he worked for some part of the Navy whose name was classified.
She read the second word on the page again.
Tigris.
She had no idea what that meant.
The dates were June fourteenth and July second, the same summer Liam died. The fire was in August of that year.
She knew with absolute certainty that Liam had been working on something in the last weeks of his life that had nothing to do with this town or anyone in it. And she knew it had to do with the part of his life he’d brought home from the Navy and had never quite put down.
He’d never mentioned it to her let alone shared any details with her. The only reason she was aware of it was because she’d known him since he was six years old and had an unerring instinct for when he was keeping a secret from her.
She got her phone out and took photographs of the paper, front and back. She folded the paper back the way she’d found it, slid it between the same two recipes, and closed the book.
She went to wake her daughter.
Lily was a furnace and a tornado and an unsolved philosophical question in the morning, and Grace roused her slowly by sitting on the edge of her bed and rubbing circles between her shoulder blades until she woke.
The room was dimly lit by a small night light. Several stuffed toys were piled on the pillow beside her daughter's head.
"Time to wake up, Baby. I’m making pancakes today."
"With strawberries?"
"Absolutely."
Lily opened one eye, clearly evaluating whether strawberry pancakes justified getting up. "Okay," she declared.
She sat up, picked a seal out of the pile of stuffies beside her and tucked it under her arm, then got out of bed with the staggering dignity of a tiny queen who’d decided to permit morning to come.
A few minutes later, Lily sat at the kitchen table in her unicorn pajamas with the seal propped against the napkin holder where it could supervise her consumption of pancakes and strawberries.
"Mommy, who came into my room last night?"
Grace froze.
She kept her hand on the spatula. She kept her shoulders even. She kept the corners of her mouth in the same place they had been a second ago. But her insides felt completely hollow. "Why do you ask, Sweetie?"
"Cinnabun was on the floor last night when I went to sleep. He's on my pillow now."
Grace turned the pancakes over. They hissed against the pan in exactly the way they were supposed to. "Did you pick him up in your sleep, Lovebug?"
"No."
"How do you know?"
"Because I always put him on the floor by the bed so he can watch the window and make sure no bad fairies come in. He doesn't go on the pillow because then he can't see the window around my other stuffies."
Grace lifted the pancakes onto a plate.
"Did you open your window last night, by any chance?"
"I don't know how." Lily added, "Maybe Cinnabun climbed up by himself because he wanted to be on the bed."
"Maybe." Her voice was hoarse, but thankfully, Lily didn’t seem to notice.
Lily went back to eating her pancakes.
Grace poured Lily a glass of orange juice with shaking hands. She sat at the table and watched her daughter eat. She didn’t cry. Or scream. Or do any of the things she wanted to.
She picked up her phone.
She set it back down.
She picked it up again. And this time, she texted Reno.
Something happened at the house. Lily's safe. I'm dropping her at school and then I need to see you. Tell me where to meet you.
His answer was instantaneous.
Sheriff's office. I’ll be waiting for you.
On the drive to preschool, Lily sang the alphabet four times in a row, and Grace nodded and made sounds in the right places. She dropped Lily off. Kissed her on the head twice. Watched her daughter trot in the door. Waved at the teacher who greeted Lily and ushered her inside.
She’s safe. My baby’s safe.
The relief that flooded her was so overwhelming she could barely breathe beneath it. Then she put both hands on the wheel and drove to the sheriff's office.
Reno's truck was already in the lot. He got out when she pulled in. He had an expression on his face Grace hadn’t seen before.
Not the careful, courteous attention of the man who had been helping with security, not the thoughtful quiet of the man who’d taken her seriously about sprigs of rosemary.
This was something tight and focused, too intense for anger.
She got out of her car and her knees wouldn’t quite hold her. She stopped clinging to the door.
Swiftly, he set his coffee on the hood of her car and strode to her.
He didn’t say a word. He just wrapped her in a fierce hug.
She leaned into him and let all the terror she’d been holding at bay for the past half-hour roll through her.
She started trembling all over, but he just held her until the worst of it passed and she nodded against his flannel-covered chest.
"What happened?" he rasped.
Grace told him.
He listened intently, without interrupting, his eyes on her face and the rest of him absolutely still.
When she was done, he asked, "Was the window in her room closed when you went in this morning to wake her?"
"I didn't check."