Chapter Forty
Brady
I pushed open the door to Cookies and Coffee, and a wall of laughter, overlapping chatter, and a buzz of active children hit me. At first the vitality of it felt wrong. How could the world still be spinning while my brother was missing?
Then I saw her.
Elise sat on the floorboards right in the middle of a sea of kids, her sleeves rolled up, a streak of blue paint across one cheek and marker stains on her fingers.
She was helping a little girl steady a square of fabric while three others waited their turn.
The entire back area of the diner had been turned into a craft explosion.
Squares of material were everywhere, some already decorated, others already sewn together in crooked, enthusiastic lines.
She looked up.
When our eyes met, she stood and moved straight into my arms, wrapping her hands around my waist and holding on tight.
I buried my face in her hair, breathing in the faint smell of cookies, markers, and her.
And for one fleeting moment, I didn’t feel overwhelmed.
With her in my arms, a good outcome felt possible.
“Is there any news?” she asked against my chest.
“Not yet.” I tightened my arms around her before easing back enough to see her face. “But the press is handled for now. And my father . . .”
Her eyes searched mine. “Your father?” she asked carefully.
“Is harmlessly occupied.”
One of her eyebrows lifted and despite all that was going on around us, I took a moment to appreciate how her expressions were becoming more animated the longer she was with me. Maybe I needed something good to be happening in the mix of everything else. Or maybe she was trusting the world more.
While I was trusting it less.
“Palila and Emma were already on a mission to keep Cody occupied when they came across me trying to lure my father away from the police station again.” I sighed.
“They’re friends of Nora’s but we all grew up together.
No explanation necessary. I didn’t even have to ask them for help.
Palila offered to take Cody back to Evan and Nora’s house to go through Evan’s paperwork, business files, and anything he might have left behind that could point toward who wanted him gone.
Cody needs to feel useful, and Nora needs him close.
Emma commandeered my dad. She’s taking him back to his house to look for anything Evan might have left there.
Notes. Receipts. I wasn’t sure he’d go, but she told him that no one knows Evan better than he does and that’s what the search needs. ”
“And that worked.”
“It sure did. My father’s Achilles’ heel always has been his ego.”
Elise’s hand slid down my arm. “These people love your family.”
“Love. Hate. I’m sure it’s a mix, but all of that falls to the wayside when someone is in need.” I glanced toward the front windows, toward the street beyond them, still flashing with emergency lights. “I’ve never been so grateful that my father chose this place to drag us to each summer.”
Her mouth softened. “I can see why.”
The tightness in my throat eased. “You fit right in.”
She quickly blinked a few times. “Is it odd that I feel more at home here than in Basin Ridge?”
“No.” Speaking of Basin Ridge. “Have you heard from your father?”
“Not a word.”
I wanted to believe that.
God, I wanted to believe something.
“I need to tell you something.” Her gaze flicked briefly toward the back of the café, then returned to mine. “I stepped away for a few minutes and went online.”
The tension returned instantly, tightening my shoulders. “Stepped away where?”
“Into the back room,” she said quickly. “Mabel had the floor. Beth was with the younger kids. I went into the back office and used my phone to do a search.”
“Elise.”
“Everything I did was untraceable.” Her voice stayed calm, but there was no apology in it. “I didn’t contact my father. I didn’t send anything out that could expose where I am. But I couldn’t do nothing.”
“What did you find?”
“Nothing useful yet.” Her mouth tightened around the word yet. “No flagged movement on the obvious financial channels. No sudden security chatter connected to your family. Or mine. Nothing on the dark web that I could tie to Evan, Cody Burke, or Dominic Corisi.”
Dominic’s name landed heavily between us.
“You checked Dominic?” I asked. “Can you do that without him knowing?”
A trace of pride showed in her eyes. “If you never tell him, then yes. I’m that good.”
I believed her.
Still, the scope of the players made me cautious. “We can’t alienate him. Not now.”
Her eyes held mine. “He won’t know, Brady. I know what this looks like from the outside. Me. My father. All the things I didn’t tell you, but I’m on your side. And I’m good at what I do. Better than most in my field.”
I took in the marker stains on her fingers, the blue paint on her cheek, and the exhaustion she was trying to hide behind an analytical shield. God, help me. “I trust you.”
Those three words broke her defenses completely. A tear escaped down her cheek. I wiped the moisture away gently with the pad of my thumb.
“I’ll keep looking,” she vowed. “Quietly. Carefully.”
I kissed the smudge of paint on her cheek. “What I want to know is what you’ve been up to here because you’re covered with paint.”
She looked briefly startled, as if she had entirely forgotten the evidence of chaos on her own skin.
Then her expression changed, opening into something soft and almost shy.
“We’re making a welcome home quilt for Evan for when he’s found,” she said, her voice soft but sure.
“The kids are each doing a square. Some are drawing pictures, some are writing notes, some are putting down memories. When they finish with their square, we’re doing random crafts with them.
I thought they’d tire of that, and it could be the constant sugar we’re serving them, but they’re crafting machines. ”
I looked past her at the growing patchwork spread across the diner floor.
Some squares were careful and balanced. Others were wild, glue-heavy, and full of heart.
A purple horse with six legs took up the center of one square.
Another had the words COME HOME EVAN written in marker so thick the letters bled into the fabric edges.
One tiny handprint had been stamped in yellow paint beside a crooked heart.
A couple of teenagers were trying to sew pieces together with varying degrees of success, while two younger kids argued over whether glitter belonged on every square or just theirs.
Mabel caught my eye from across the room and gave me a small, tired smile. She looked fiercely proud, but exhausted in a way I hadn’t seen in her before.
The worry for Evan remained a live wire under my skin, but seeing Elise here with paint on her hands, completely integrated into the room, did something to me. She wasn’t an outsider looking in. She had stepped straight into the center of my world and found a way to support it.
I didn’t know what to do with that reality. With her. With the way I could still be angry, still hurt, still completely unsure, and also want to pull her closer until every unanswered question between us quieted.
“Do you still have some pieces left?” I asked.
Mabel answered before Elise could. “Endless supply. We’re prepared.”
Of course they were.
I looked back at Elise. “Would you like to make one with me?”
Her eyes went shiny. Tears still welled up, and she didn’t try to hide them from me. She just nodded, a small, overwhelmed smile breaking through her defenses.
We found a spot on the floorboards near the younger kids. Mabel brought over fresh squares, lemonade, and this time small sandwiches. The little ones crowded closer, chattering about their own squares and showing us their progress.
“Mine has a mountain,” one boy said, shoving a fabric square toward my knee. “Because I can draw triangles.”
“That’s a good mountain,” I said.
“It’s where they’re looking.”
My throat tightened.
Elise and I exchanged a look.
The boy continued with the blunt seriousness of a child who had absorbed far more than the adults intended him to. “They will find him, right?”
The truth was too ugly to share with a kid, so I held the smile in place by sheer force of will and said, “Absolutely. Have you seen how many people are looking?”
“My parents are both out there. They took their motorcycles so I couldn’t go.
I hope they don’t get lost too.” He studied me with a lingering shadow of fear.
The mountain had nearly taken Nora from us before being merciful, but it wasn’t always kind.
Just a few years back, Nora’s mother, Celia, had gone missing in those exact woods, only to be found dead the next day.
“They won’t.” I knew his parents. Christine and John Steman. Good solid people. “Do you want me to call them?”
“Yes!”
I called his father. He answered immediately, said they were out by the river, going down dirt roads. When I handed the phone to his son, there was a flurry of questions, then a reassurance that everyone was fine.
When the young boy handed my phone back to me, he did so with a spontaneous hug that nearly had me in tears. With a sniff, I said, “See. There’s nothing to worry about.”
Once he wandered off, I returned my attention to making the quilt square, keeping my hands moving. Elise leaned against my side as I worked. I drew my best impression of Evan’s horse Rogue and wrote Don’t make me come find you.
The letters came out uneven.
I left them exactly that way.
Elise asked about my drawing and I explained it, briefly including how horses had somehow become part of the family feud. Friesians versus Paso Finos. Both beautiful. Both proud. And somehow, thriving despite the chaos around them.
Like my feelings for Elise.
I reached over and laced my fingers with her marker-stained ones. She squeezed back, her eyes still bright.
“What did you make?” I asked.
She hesitated, then turned her fabric square toward my face. It wasn’t a picture. Not exactly. She had drawn a series of small, uneven lines connecting a house, a mountain, a horse, a coffee cup, and a cluster of stick figures holding hands. At the bottom, in careful block letters, she had written:
A place worth coming back to.
A sudden pressure locked down my ribs. “Elise.”
“I didn’t know what else to put,” she said quickly, her words racing. “I know it’s not technically a memory because I don’t know Evan, and I didn’t want to make an inaccurate emotional claim, so I thought maybe the point was—”
I kissed her. Quickly. Just enough to stop the explanation before she could analyze away the thing she had made beautiful.
The room didn’t disappear. The kids didn’t vanish. The underlying dread didn’t leave. But Elise went completely still beneath my mouth, then softened for one heartbreaking second and suddenly this felt survivable.
When I pulled back, her eyes were wide and wet. “I’m so sorry I was ever anything but honest with you,” she whispered.
“I know.”
“Are you okay?”
“I will be.”
Her fingers tightened around mine. “Brady . . .”
“We don’t have to sort it all out now. I just needed to kiss you.”
A startled breath left her, almost a laugh and almost a sob. “Okay.”
I rested my forehead against hers for one second, because one second was all the time I could risk giving myself.
She closed her eyes. “I needed that kiss too.”
Behind us, a little voice piped up. “Are they going to have a baby?”
Mabel answered without missing a beat. “Jonathan Dean, that’s none of your business.”
He grumbled, but added, “It is if it happens here.”
I eased back from Elise, but I didn’t let go of her hand. “We’d better tone it down.”
“That’s not how babies are made,” a teenager called out from the coloring table.
The little boy put his hands on his hips and declared, “That’s how I was made.”
A ripple of easy laughter moved through the room.
One of Mabel’s grandchildren came over with another stack of completed squares, his cheeks flushed from the effort. “These are ready to be added to the big part.”
And thankfully all discussion of the process of procreation ended.
“I can help,” Elise said, already shifting toward the pile.
I moved with her, the dark outside the windows pulling at my coat. “I can’t stay here. I just wanted to check in.”
She nodded. “I understand.”
“Will you be okay here?”
“More than okay.” Her eyes searched mine. “Hey, be careful.”
Careful wasn’t a promise I could make so I didn’t. I was heading out to do whatever I could in whatever manner would bring Evan home.
Elise’s fingers slipped slowly from mine.
I turned toward the door, taking one last look at the quilt, at the kids, at my mother handing someone another damn cookie, at Mabel watching the room with tired, fierce eyes, and at Elise kneeling back down in the dead center of it all.