Chapter 12
TRACE
My heart raced as I returned to my own campsite. Nerves, fear, guilt, satisfaction, excitement, hunger for more. All of my emotions tumbled together in a messy cauldron in my gut.
What the fuck had I done? I’d gotten naked with Wolfe Marian. Derek and Jude’s son. Someone I’d carefully put into a rigid box in my mind and sworn not to cross a line with.
Today, I’d flung myself so far over the line, I couldn’t even pretend to be in the same zip code with it any longer.
I should have felt remorse, maybe. Should have wished it had never happened.
But I couldn’t. Not when it had been even better than I’d imagined.
Since I didn’t have a cooler or fridge, I decided to put off the trip to the market until later. But I did hop in my rental and head away from the campground, for the sole purpose of keeping myself from returning to Wolfe’s van and begging to stay, pleading with him for all the strings.
That wasn’t happening. In fact, even considering it was a disaster.
So I drove the half hour to Montrose and found a coffee shop called Ladybird. Thankfully, they had great coffee and a hummus-and-sprout wrap that was light and delicious.
They also had Wi-Fi, so I pulled out my laptop to catch up on email and work from SERA.
It was settling in a good way, anchoring me back into my real life and reminding me I had big responsibilities outside of Hush, Colorado.
I spent two hours catching up on work before shooting Derek and Jude another text confirming Wolfe was safe and well.
I couldn’t help but scroll Instagram again, too, clicking through photos to suck in as much information as I could about Wolfe and his new friends.
@BGShay, the young woman I recognized from Jake’s Place, had reposted a video of someone excitedly discussing the “Who Is Fletcher Coe Drama” again.
That poor guy.
I almost scrolled away out of respect for the man’s privacy before realizing something in it rang a vague bell.
“… a Ski Aster Valley sticker on his laptop! You can clearly see it in the reflection in the window. Add that to what we know about the triangulation of the view from the window in that post—thanks @WannaBeFletcherC for that scoop, BTW!—and we know Fletcher was in Kauai, Hawaii early last summer and he’s been skiing in Aster Valley at some point. Probably.”
I blinked and watched the video again.
And again.
And a third time.
I changed the zoom on my screen so I could zero in on the screenshots from Fletcher Coe’s Instagram posts, which were flashed up as “evidence.”
By the end of my fifth viewing, my gut was roiling.
Fact: the entire Marian family had been in Hawaii early last summer for Tommy’s aborted wedding.
Also fact: the Marians had friends and family in Aster Valley, and had definitely been there in recent years.
Which didn’t mean anything, necessarily. It could all be a coincidence.
But those same instincts I’d come to rely on in my work, the ones that had enabled me to track Wolfe to Colorado, were screaming at me that it wasn’t.
I quickly clicked through the #WhoIsFletcherCoe tag, where post after post speculated about the identity of the famous songwriter.
It wasn’t surprising that Fletcher Coe had so much interest. The man was fucking brilliant. He’d been around for several years, but I’d been a little late to the game, only clueing in after Jude’s casual mention of the guy last summer. Since then, “Not Mine” had become my own secret lament.
A random songwriter on the internet had somehow reached inside me and pulled out the core contradiction in my life. The man I wanted, the man I couldn’t stop thinking about, wasn’t mine and couldn’t be. Fletcher had managed to put those feelings into words and melody.
And now—
Now I was faced with the idea that Fletcher was—
I clicked on a post from a month ago. I hadn’t paid attention to the video while it played the other night, since I’d been drifting off to sleep, but I watched closely now. And there, at the edge of the man’s wrists and behind the guitar on his headless chest, was a recognizable red.
SERA red.
The kind used in our instructors’ hoodies.
Could it have been any other red hoodie? Maybe. Sure. But I had a stack of hoodies in that distinctive color at home and two with me right now on this trip.
Thankfully, the SERA logo wasn’t visible in the frame, which was the only thing keeping this post from being a massive clue that the mysterious Fletcher Coe was—
Fuck. I still couldn’t bring myself to think the words.
Just before I clicked away to look for more evidence, the sound from the video caught up to me. The melody was lovely, and Fletcher Coe’s smooth voice rolled out deep and familiar through my earbuds as the lyrics scrolled across the video post.
’Cause the pinks and oranges are calling me
Like a fire that doesn’t need a name,
And the freedom tastes like dust and honey
On the edge where I belong.
I’m letting go of who I’ve been,
Like a stone I don’t have to carry—
But even in all this open,
I’m still chasing something I can’t hold.
At the very end, the video flashed away from his hands on the guitar to a jaw-dropping photo of the Grand Canyon at sunset or sunrise.
The Grand Canyon.
The SERA hoodie.
Hawaii.
Ski Aster Valley.
I’m letting go of who I’ve been.
I closed my eyes and concentrated on breathing.
Was it actually possible that Wolfe Marian—shy, sweet, manager of the Bluebell Foundation Wolfe Marian, my Wolfe Marian—was also the world’s hottest songwriter?
I would have thought I’d recognize his voice, but I could barely remember the last time I’d heard Wolfe sing. It was before he went to college, definitely. Before he’d stopped playing and singing around the rest of us. Maybe his singing voice had deepened in that time.
My heart began to thunder as my brain supplied a cascade of information about Fletcher Coe I’d picked up the other night without recognizing its importance.
Lyra Vale singing “Not Mine” at the Super Bowl—which I remembered had been on Wolfe’s birthday.
Lyra Vale accepting the Grammy on behalf of Fletcher Coe.
Looper and Mazz Aveline playing “Far Away Nights” on Saturday Night Live.
Some singer joking in an interview that his ego had taken a hit when a Fletcher Coe song had been more popular than his own songs on his newest album.
Fletcher Coe was a legend in the making. A generational talent. But he was also a shadow. A mystery people were desperate to solve because he was determined to stay out of the public eye.
That, more than anything, cemented this theory as fact in my mind.
How many people would go to the effort of crafting lyrics and melodies that could rip your heart out, then post them for the world to enjoy, but never show their face and claim the fame they’d earned?
I could think of only one.
Oh, sweetheart.
Wolfe Marian hated fame. He’d grown up around Jude’s stardom, around users and manipulators only out to befriend him for cred. Wolfe had only tried to make his own way in the music industry for about ten minutes before he’d been cruelly knocked down and forced to give it up.
Except he hadn’t stayed down. He hadn’t given it up.
And I’d missed it. I’d missed all of it.
I quickly typed in a Wikipedia search on the name and discovered his first appearance in the world was with a song called “Far Away Nights” nearly… six years ago.
Nearly six years.
For all that time, Wolfe had been leading a double life.
Who knew about it? Surely Jude and Derek, at the very least. Jude had been the one to suggest I check out the songs, after all.
Except… he hadn’t done that until last summer, years after Fletcher Coe’s songs were already public.
And when he’d recommended them, he’d told me he’d just discovered the guy.
There was no way he would have talked that way about Fletcher Coe if he’d known he was talking about Wolfe. Jude wasn’t that good at lying.
Was it possible they didn’t know?
I thought about his siblings. Lennon was a vault.
He could definitely keep the secret. But he and Wolfe weren’t necessarily close since Lennon moved to Legacy, especially since both men were on the quiet side.
Wolfe was closer to Rosie, but Rosie was a talker. Not necessarily the best secret-keeper.
Was Wolfe keeping this secret from everyone?
My fingers itched to get back in the car and return to the campground to confront him about this, but I forced myself to be still. To think a little longer before saying something I couldn’t take back.
I cared about Wolfe enough to want his comfort, and confronting him with this, letting him know that someone had discovered his secret, would probably scare the shit out of him.
I went back to Instagram and kept scrolling through reel after reel tagged with the insatiable desire to uncover Fletcher Coe’s identity.
The tag had made me angry when I first saw it the other night, but now it infuriated me. This was exactly the kind of rabid media frenzy that terrified Wolfe.
Was this why he’d really run away? Maybe it wasn’t about me at all. Maybe it was fear of being discovered.
Except that wouldn’t explain why he’d continued posting.
I moved out to the rental car and pulled out my phone to call Gabe Marian. Derek and Jude’s nephew was a game developer in South Carolina, but he also had hacking skills no one really talked about. When I’d still worked for On Your Six, Gabe had helped out on several cases.
“Hey, Trace. What’s up?” His friendly voice came over the line along with the familiar sounds of keyboard clicking.
“Do you know anyone who can put extra cybersecurity measures in place around an identity?”
There was a pause while he processed what I was asking. “You know you can lock your credit, right? I mean, if you were the victim of a scam or gave the wrong person your password, you can just—”
I made a disgruntled noise. “No. I mean, like someone’s identity needs to remain completely locked down, and I want to know who to hire to do it.”
“Okay, okay. Like, give me a hypothetical here so I know what you mean by locked down.”