Chapter 9
The rental smelled like pine cleaner and someone else’s vacation.
Cara set the bags on the kitchen counter and did what she always did when she walked into an unfamiliar space—she mapped it.
Two bedrooms, one bath, a living room with a couch that sagged in the middle and a sliding glass door overlooking a strip of scrub grass and, beyond it, the Pacific.
The ocean was doing its best impression of a mood: gray, restless, the kind of water that dared you to romanticize it.
The house was twelve miles south of Pacific Crest Wellness Center.
Tom had found it on a vacation-rental site—available midweek in January because apparently most people had the good sense not to vacation on the Oregon coast in weather like this.
It was small and shabby: two bedrooms and an outdated kitchen complete with battle-scarred table.
Exactly the kind of place four adults could work out of without drawing attention.
Wade was already outside, walking the perimeter, cataloging sight lines and exit points.
Tom had his laptop open on the kitchen table before anyone else had finished bringing in bags, his fingers moving across the keyboard with the quiet intensity she’d come to associate with Tom in work mode.
He’d mapped the facility grounds from satellite imagery during the drive up—legally, he’d assured them twice, which made Cara suspect the opposite.
“Perimeter’s clean,” Wade said, coming through the back door. Rain beaded on his jacket. “One road in, one road out. I can see the facility access road from the bluff if I hike about half a mile north.”
“Go,” Cara said. “Take Tom. I want eyes on the place before we approach anyone.”
On the drive up, they’d agreed that Cara and Reagan should check out the hospital. They wouldn’t get any useful info announcing they wanted to check up on Elena Whitfield, so they’d opt for deception. One of Cara’s main superpowers.
Tom looked up from his screen. “I’ve got the digital footprint mapped. Staff LinkedIn profiles, facility licensing records, a Yelp review from 2019 that is—” he paused, choosing his word—“illuminating. But yeah, physical recon would be smart.”
Wade nodded at Tom. Tom closed his laptop. They left together—. Wade covered the ground. Tom covered the data. Between them, little went unnoticed.
Which left Cara and Reagan in a house that smelled like pine cleaner and had nothing in the refrigerator.
“Grocery run,” Reagan announced, pulling her hair into a ponytail with the briskness of a woman who’d spent years making fast transitions between operating rooms. “If I’m staking out a wellness center in the rain, I’m doing it with real coffee and actual food.
That gas station stuff Tom bought is an insult to the concept of nutrition. ”
The store was small—the kind of coastal market that sold bait alongside baguettes and had a hand-lettered sign advertising clam chowder on weekends.
Reagan glided down the short aisles, filling the cart with the kind of practical fuel that suggested she’d provisioned more than a few long shifts.
Coffee. Eggs. Bread that didn’t come in a cellophane wrapper.
Fruit. Something called “energy bites” that Cara eyed with suspicion.
"They're good," Reagan said, catching the look. "Oats, peanut butter, dark chocolate. Trust the process."
"The last time someone told me to trust the process, I ended up with food poisoning and a very long night."
Reagan laughed—. "Your trust issues extend to snack food. Noted."
They loaded the bags into the car and drove back along the coast road with the heater on and the windows fogging.
The ocean appeared and disappeared between the headlands, vast and indifferent.
The thing Cara always felt when far from Haven Cove rose in her—.
Home was the bakery, Diane’s steady presence, the basement and its brand of organized chaos.
And Gabe. Always Gabe in the background.
Out here, she was just a woman with a name that didn’t belong to her.
Reagan waited until they were back at the house before she said it.
“So. Gabe.”
Cara poured coffee into a stained mug that said BEACH MORE WORRY LESS and sat down at the kitchen table. “What about him?”
“Cara.” Reagan’s voice was gentle and immovable. She sat across the table with her own mug—this one said SEAS THE DAY—and waited.
Cara wrapped her hands around the mug and let the warmth settle into her fingers. Outside, the ocean threw itself at the rocks with the patience of something that had all the time in the world.
"He's a good man," she said. Which was the truth and also the entire problem. "He's honest. He's careful. He notices things—not the way a cop notices things, although he does that too." She took a breath. "And I'm carrying something that could destroy both of us if he ever finds out what it is."
Reagan didn't flinch. She didn't ask what it was, either—because that was the rule, the unspoken agreement they'd all made the night the team came together.
You showed up. You did the work. You didn't dig.
Reagan knew Cara was hiding from something.
They all did. The specifics were Cara's to keep, and nobody in that basement had ever once tried to take them from her.
But knowing the shape of a thing without knowing the details didn't make it weigh less. Reagan's eyes were steady and kind, and Cara could see the question she wasn't asking: How bad?
Bad enough.
“He’d stay if you asked him to,” Reagan said.
“I know.” That was what made it worse.
The coffee maker clicked off. The ocean kept going.
“Whatever’s going on, you’re making this choice for both of you,” Reagan said quietly. “You know that, right? You’re deciding what he can handle without giving him the chance to decide for himself.”
Cara opened her mouth and closed it again. The thing about Reagan was that she delivered the hard truths clearly, without cruelty, and with the implicit understanding that knowing the problem was the first step toward fixing it.
Cara turned it around. Because deflection was a survival skill, and also because she’d been watching Reagan and Tom orbit each other for weeks and somebody needed to say something.
“Your turn.”
Reagan blinked. “My turn for what?”
“Tom.”
Reagan took a long sip of coffee—. “Tom is…” She set the mug down. Picked it up again. “Tom is very smart.”
“Yes.”
“And patient. Which—do you know how rare that is? A man who actually listens? Who doesn’t hear half your sentence and start building his response before you’ve finished?
” Reagan’s voice had gone soft —a soft Cara hadn’t heard before.
“And with Piper—the way he is with that kid. She’s all edges and opinions and he just...
lets her be that. Doesn’t try to sand her down. ”
“He likes you,” Cara said. “In case you haven’t noticed the fourteen hundred tells.”
Reagan stared at her. “You’re unsettling. You know that?”
“Professional hazard.”
“You think I’m crazy?” Quieter now. The real question under the banter.
“I think you deserve someone who sees you,” Cara said. “And I think Tom does.”
The kitchen was quiet. Rain against the windows.
The ocean somewhere beyond the glass, doing its ancient, indifferent thing.
Two women sitting with coffee in a rented house on the Oregon coast, talking around the enormous, terrifying, wonderful fact that they’d both found something worth being afraid of.
Lord. This mess we’re in, this tangled, beautiful, impossible mess.
I don’t know what You’re doing with any of it.
But Reagan deserves joy. Tom deserves a partner who matches him.
And Piper—that fierce, brilliant girl—deserves a woman like Reagan in her life.
Whatever You’re building here, don’t let us wreck it.
Her phone buzzed.
Gabe.
Graham Whitfield is Elena’s uncle. He’s been having Voss surveilled. His security team has been watching the bakery. He may know about you. He’s heading to Portland now. Travels with a driver who doubles as security. Be careful.
Cara read it twice, then set the phone on the table. Reagan, reading her face, set down her coffee.
“What?”
“Looks like we’re about to have company.
Elena Whitfield’s uncle is heading up.” Cara stared at the screen, the words rearranging everything she’d thought she understood about the shape of this thing.
Graham Whitfield. Elena’s uncle. Private surveillance.
Watching the bakery—watching them. And now heading this direction, toward Portland, toward Pacific Crest.
“That could be a good thing,” Reagan noted. “I’d like to believe the woman’s got people who care about her.”
“Right?” Cara picked up the phone and typed back.
Got your text. We’re careful. Don’t worry about us.
She hit send and looked at Reagan, who was already clearing the mugs. “How long until the guys are back?”
Cara checked the time. “Soon.”
“Then we brief them when they walk in the door.” Reagan’s voice had changed—still warm, but underneath it now was . “And then we figure out what we’re actually walking into tomorrow at that hospital.”
Cara nodded. Outside, the Pacific hammered the rocks and the sky pressed down like a hand, and somewhere on the coast highway, a man with a limo and a driver who wasn’t really a driver was heading their way.
The quiet was definitely over.