Chapter 25
They left before dawn. Wade drove. Cara watched the coast emerge from the dark in stages—first the sound of it, then the smell, then the slow gray materialization of sea stacks and surf against a sky that couldn’t decide whether to commit to morning.
Her ribs had settled into a constant low throb she was learning to breathe around.
Gabe had watched from the doorway as they pulled out. Arms crossed, jaw set. His face said everything. She’d pushed the image away before they hit the highway.
The guardrail still wore the scar—scraped metal, broken reflectors, a gouge in the gravel shoulder where Pirelli’s car had gone through. Below it, the slope dropped into brush and second-growth timber.
“This is where she climbed out,” Cara said.
Wade was already out of the car, studying the shoulder. He crouched at the guardrail, fingers tracing the gouge in the metal.
“She went over the passenger side,” he said. “Driver’s door would have been crumpled against the slope.”
He rose, scanning the tree line. “We go north. Grid pattern. Stay below the road.”
Cara followed his lead. Her skills were rooms and faces and conversations. His were this.
Twenty minutes in, working through wet brush and second-growth fir, Wade paused.
“Broken branch. See how the break is low? Someone moving fast, not watching their feet. Running.”
“In the dark.”
He shook his head. “Most people would have stayed with the car and waited for help.”
“Most people aren’t running from the people who are supposed to be the help.”
Wade glanced at her. He’d heard more in that sentence than she meant. He didn’t push. Wade never pushed. It was one of the reasons she could work with him—he noticed everything and said nothing.
Forty minutes in, a vehicle slowed on the highway above.
They went flat without a word. Cara’s ribs hit the cold ground and the pain whited out her vision for half a second. Wade’s hand was out, palm down.
Camera shutter. Multiple clicks. A woman’s voice, something appreciative about the view.
The door closed. The car pulled away.
Tourist. Taking photos from the pullout.
Wade exhaled. Cara exhaled. She pressed her forehead into the cold dirt and willed her heart rate down.
“We’re a mess,” she muttered.
“Speak for yourself.” Wade was already up, brushing mud off his jacket. He offered her a hand.
They walked on. A drainage culvert under a logging road—concrete pipe, three feet across, screened by ferns and blackberry. Wade crouched at the opening. Went still.
“Cara.”
She came up beside him. Inside: a torn jacket, dried blood on the concrete beneath it. A wadded pile of newspaper and dry leaves sat against one wall—insulation, makeshift but deliberate, along with an empty water bottleand a candy bar wrapper.
Someone had sheltered here. Curled up in a concrete pipe in January on the Oregon coast with a torn jacket, a candy bar, and a nest of newspaper—whatever she'd carried out of that wreck.
“How long?” Cara’s voice was barely a whisper.
Wade studied the interior. “One night. Maybe two. Blood’s dry but not old. The candy bar wrapper still smells like chocolate.” He paused. “She left the jacket. That means she found something better, or she was moving fast enough that the weight wasn’t worth it.”
Cara stared at the jacket. Something cracked in her chest that had nothing to do with the ribs.
North from the culvert. Wade mapped it as they went—a broken fern, a footprint in soft ground, subtle disturbances that meant nothing to a hiker and everything to a man who’d tracked people through worse.
“She wasn’t stumbling,” he said.
“So the crash didn’t hurt her badly.”
“Or it did and she’s tougher than the injury.” Wade knelt at a drainage ditch, reading a partial print. “You know anyone like that?”
She didn’t answer.
The trail went cold at a creek crossing. Footprints to the water’s edge, then nothing. She’d walked in the creek to kill her tracks.
Wade stood at the bank for a long time. Reading the water, the rocks, both banks. Nothing.
“Smart,” he said, respectfully. One survivor recognizing another.
At the creek, it hit her.
What was the endgame? Not just for the case—for this.
The thing they’d built. Helping people felt like purpose.
But they couldn’t keep running off-the-books investigations out of rental houses and bakery basements forever.
No legal standing. No funding. No plan for when the case ended and everyone went back to lives that might not exist anymore.
And Gabe. The word he’d said in the parking lot—stay—still sat in her chest like something swallowed wrong.
How could she pursue a man she couldn’t be honest with?
He didn’t know who she was. Not the name she was born with, not the things she’d done, not the federal warrant that would unravel everything.
She couldn’t say stay when staying meant building on a lie.
She couldn’t say I want you when the woman he wanted didn’t exist.
And the worst part—standing at this creek, cold climbing through her boots—was understanding Elena completely. A woman alone. Running. With no one to trust.
Cara had built a bakery and a team and something that looked like a life. But underneath it, she was still in the concrete pipe. Still running. Still surviving on borrowed names and iron discipline—a woman who’d taught herself not to need anyone.
The creek ran. The trees dripped. The trail was gone.
They didn’t talk on the walk back. Two people who understood that sometimes the work was the conversation.
At the car, Wade stopped to look back at the tree line.
“She’s smart. Tough. Staying alive. That means she has a plan. We just haven’t figured out what it is yet.”
Wade was right. Elena had a plan.
Cara didn’t. Not for the case, the team, Gabe. Not for any of it.
She got in the car and closed her eyes.
Lord, I don’t know where she is. I don’t know where I am either. But You do. And right now, that’ll have to be enough.
Somewhere behind them, the creek ran on, carrying Elena’s tracks to the ocean.