Chapter 6
The wind off the harbor hit like a personal grudge.
Cara pulled her jacket tighter and checked her watch—eight-fifteen, Thursday morning—and reminded herself that she’d chosen this spot on purpose.
The overlook at the top of the bluff trail was open on three sides, which meant the January gusts came through sideways.
Below, the fishing fleet pitched at its moorings in the chop, halyards clanging, and the whole Oregon coast looked like it was trying to rinse itself into the sea.
Cara had chosen this spot to meet Derek, and she’d arrived twenty minutes early because she always arrived twenty minutes early.
A habit from a previous life—one of the useful ones, like checking exits and never sitting with her back to a door.
You got there first. You chose the ground.
You watched the other person walk in and read their body language before they’d had a chance to arrange it.
Public enough to be safe. Isolated enough that Voss wouldn’t perform for an audience. And uncomfortable enough that he wouldn’t want to linger.
Forty yards down the trail, Wade leaned against the junction signpost. She hadn’t asked him to come. He’d told her he was coming, in the tone he used when a subject wasn’t open for discussion. “You’re not meeting this guy alone.” That had been the whole conversation.
Derek rounded the corner from the parking lot six minutes late, which was its own kind of information.
His shoes were wrong for the terrain—leather-soled, city shoes that slipped on the wet gravel, and he had on yet another, over-priced coat.
He hadn’t researched the meeting location, which meant he’d assumed she’d accommodate him. She filed that away.
He approached with that same careful body language from the diner—hands visible, posture open.
But this time she caught the expression before he arranged his face: irritation.
Brief, controlled, gone in a blink. He’d wanted the bakery.
The warmth, the coffee, the home-court advantage of a woman behind a counter.
She’d taken that from him, and it had cost him a half-second of honesty.
He jabbed a finger at Wade. “He with you?”
“Yup.”
Derek clearly considered arguing, but finally just shrugged.
She let him settle. Asked a few soft questions about Elena—her habits, her friends, places she might go. She wasn’t gathering intelligence yet. She was establishing rhythm. Getting him comfortable. Getting him talking.
Then, when his shoulders had dropped and his voice had found its rehearsed groove, she said it. Quietly. Almost gently.
“Derek, why didn’t you tell us about the restraining order?”
The silence stretched. Below them, the fleet rocked and creaked in the wind.
His face did three things in quick succession: surprise—real—then calculation—rapid, surgical—and then recalibration. The look of a man deciding which version of the truth served him best. She knew that look. She’d worn it herself, in rooms with higher stakes than this one.
“Okay. Wow.” He laughed—short, sharp. “You guys are thorough.” He rubbed his palms on his thighs.
“Look—that was months ago. She was ripped up about her dad dying. She was drinking. A lot. Her friends got in her ear, and I was working eighty-hour weeks trying to keep our company funded. It got ugly. I handled it badly.” He spread his hands.
“I should’ve told you. But honestly? It felt like ancient history.
I didn’t want you guys getting sidetracked by something that has nothing to do with finding her. ”
Cara noted what he didn’t say. He didn’t say Elena was wrong to file it.
He said she was grieving, she was drinking—which put the blame on Elena’s emotional state rather than his behavior.
A man who’d been falsely accused would say it was unfair.
A man who knew he’d earned it would explain the circumstances.
She filed that distinction carefully.
Then she gave him what he needed: understanding. Not forgiveness, not agreement. Just the warmth of a woman who’d heard worse and wasn’t shocked.
She softened her posture. Let her voice drop half a register. Nodded at the right moments. Mirrored his language back to him—a rough patch, under stress, things got complicated. She didn’t challenge his framing. She walked alongside it.
This was the con artist’s deepest skill, and it had nothing to do with lying.
It was empathy weaponized—the ability to make someone feel so completely understood that they forgot to guard what they were saying.
She’d learned it selling forged paintings to collectors who wanted to believe.
She’d refined it undercover at Meridian Capital.
She was using it now on a man who might have drugged his girlfriend, and the ease of it made her stomach turn.
But it worked. Derek relaxed. Started filling in details he’d held back before—how Elena had struggled after first, her mother’s death, and now her father’s.
How the substance issues were “serious, deeply serious.” He’d tried to help, he insisted, but she pushed him away.
The restraining order, in this expanded version, had been filed during what he called “her lowest point.”
While he talked, she built a quiet map. She asked about Elena’s friends—a college roommate named Shayna, he thought. “Or no. Sara. Yeah. That’s it. I do know the gal lives in Seattle.” Other than that, he didn’t know.
“Some chicks from yoga or spin or whatever,” he added, dismissively.
She asked about the Foundation—surface-level, conversational, nothing that would signal investigation. Derek mentioned the board had been “going through some restructuring stuff” around the time Elena entered treatment. He mentioned Elena’s uncle Graham had been “supportive through everything.”
Cara noted the flicker when he said Graham’s name. Not hostility. Wariness. As if Graham were a variable he hadn’t accounted for.
She knew the type. “So Graham’s the personal face of the Whitfields.”
Derek snorted. “Bingo. You want to do business with the Whitfields on any level, you deal with Graham.”
Then Derek leaned forward with the sudden energy of a man pivoting to the pitch. “So here’s the thing—I should come with you. I know Elena. I know where she’d go, who she’d call. I’ve got contacts up and down the coast.” He held Cara’s gaze. “Honestly? I don’t think you find her without me.”
Thirty seconds ago he’d been contrite about a restraining order. Now he was pitching himself as necessary. The speed of the pivot told her more than anything he’d said.
“Derek.” Her voice was warm and final. “We work independently.”
“But you need me.” He sounded baffled, not angry. The tone of a man who ordered things and received them. “I should at least—”
“Non-negotiable,” she said, still smiling.
“This is—” He stopped. Tried a different angle, dropping his voice to something conspiratorial. “Come on. I’m trying to help. Isn’t that what you want? Someone who actually knows her?”
From the trailhead, Wade’s voice carried on the wind. “She’s being generous. I’d have told you less.”
Derek looked between them. Whatever calculation he was running, the answer came back insufficient. He stood, brushed rain from his coat, and straightened like a man leaving a meeting he’d decided to end. “Fine. But I want updates.”
“You’ll hear from us when there’s something to hear.” Cara lied. He wasn’t a client. She owed him nothing.
He held her gaze a beat too long—the power move of a man who confused eye contact with dominance—then walked back down the trail without saying goodbye. His leather soles slipped twice on the wet gravel. He didn’t look back.
Wade came to stand beside her under the shelter. The harbor spread below them, gray and rough. A gull screamed somewhere in the fog.
“He bought it,” Cara said.
“You’re good at that.” Not a compliment. An observation.
“I know.”
She watched Derek disappear around the bend. He was dangerous. Not the loud kind. The quiet kind. She recognized it because she’d spent her adult life around men like that.
And leverage, for a woman living under a name that wasn’t hers, was the most dangerous thing in the world.
The cold arithmetic she ran every day surfaced without permission.
She was Cara Sweet, baker, neighbor, friend.
She was also Carly Reid, convicted art forger, who’d served three years before taking an NYPD deal to go undercover at a financial firm.
The star witness was murdered before trial.
The deal evaporated. The people who were supposed to protect her decided she was more useful back in a cell.
She’d run. She’d been running ever since.
Haven Cove was supposed to be the end of the running. Most days, it felt like it might be.
Lord, help me walk this line.
The prayer surfaced—quiet, practical, the kind a woman offered when the margin for error was exactly this thin.
They walked back down the trail together. Wade didn’t ask what she was thinking. He didn’t need to.
Cara pulled out her phone in the parking lot and texted the group.
Voss handled. Got some leads. Tomorrow we stop talking about Elena Whitfield and start looking for her.
Reagan: FINALLY. I’ve had a bag packed since Tuesday.
Tom: I’ve mapped three rental properties within range of Pacific Crest. Also I may have already pulled satellite imagery of the facility grounds. In a completely legal way.
Wade: So we hit this Pacific Crest place?
Cara: Coast highway north. Portland first, then the facility. Thinking we leave at six.
Piper: I’m in. I’ll bring the road snacks. Adults can’t be trusted to handle that.
Tom: You’re sitting this one out, babe.
Piper: Dad!
Tom: School, Piper. Hello??
Piper: It’s ONE road trip.
Tom: It’s a school week.
Reagan: He’s right, honey. We’ve got this.
Cara could practically hear the silence on Piper’s end. The silence of a teenager who knew she’d lost and was composing her dignified retreat.
Piper: Fine. But I’m looking in on Diane and Agent while you’re gone. Someone has to make sure that cat doesn’t stage a coup.
Cara: Deal.
Piper: Also tell Wade I left him trail mix in the basement. The good kind, not the weird healthy kind.
Wade glanced at her phone screen. “What kind of trail mix?”
“The good kind, apparently.”
He put the truck in gear. “I knew I liked that kid.”
Cara pocketed the phone and watched the harbor disappear behind them as they pulled onto the main road. Six AM tomorrow. Road trip. The coast highway, the facility, and a woman who’d chosen a January storm over one more night inside those walls.
Whatever they found up there, the quiet was over.