9. Greer #2
“I hope it comes back. I’ve got to find us a place to stay tonight,” she said, pressing the refresh button a few more times.
“Don’t worry about it,” he said, reaching over the console and giving her thigh a squeeze. He knew this was way outside of her comfort zone, and sure, he’d stay in a tent if he needed to, but he knew better than to ask that of her. “We’ll find a hotel. The coast is probably full of them.”
“Yes, but will we find a hotel that’s nearby? Or will we have to go out of town?”
He tried his hardest not to smile too much. He had her in a car, taking a spontaneous six-hour drive to a place neither one of them had ever been to before. And while she had taken a large leap out of her comfort zone with him, she still clung to some order.
“I promise you, we will find a place to stay,” he said, exacting his words and glancing in her direction. “I’ll make sure you’ve got a safe place to sleep tonight.”
Surprisingly, those words seemed to work, and Tessa sighed, bringing her phone back down to her lap once more.
“Thank you, Greer.”
Reaching for her hand, he gave her fidgeting fingers a squeeze. She opened her hands up, wrapping his with her own, squeezing him back, and holding on. As if she needed him to anchor her.
“Anytime, Tess.”
It was going to be a long trip, for sure.
Not only was it lengthy to start with, but they were traveling a lot of backcountry roads through the mountains.
Rest areas were already few and far between, and any place that consisted of more than a parking lot, a picnic table, an ancient grill on a post, and a porta-potty was, so far, nonexistent.
But one good thing about having few distractions was that it yielded a lot of time for thinking. And Greer still had so many questions about how Troy found them.
“How—” he began, trying to figure out a gentle way to ask her. When he couldn’t come up with one, he continued anyway. “How did Troy find us?”
“That’s the thing,” she said, tearing her eyes from the mountain landscape and back to him again. “I don’t have any idea.”
“Did you tell anyone about our trip?” he asked. “I know your father knows. And your mom knows where we went, just not necessarily why.”
“They both wanted to get me out of Boston so badly, I can’t imagine they’d have told anyone much,” she offered. “I mean, sure, they may have told their friends I went to New York for a quick trip, but I’m not sure they told anyone any more than that. Not even my brothers.”
Greer nodded, knowing her brothers weren’t fans of Troy or his antics. There was no way they’d have let anything slip.
Then, realization dawned on him. “Oh crap, I know how he figured it out.”
“How?”
Greer grimaced, tilting to the side to fish his phone out of his back pocket. Swiping his thumb over the sensor on the side, he passed it to her. “I’ve been getting notifications on my socials all morning. Remember the guys that got us free from the storage room?”
“The volunteer firefighters?” she asked, opening up his notifications and scrolling through.
“They put up some of the pics they took on social media,” he said. “That has to be how he figured out we were in town.”
“No.” Tessa paused a beat. “No, I really don’t think that was it. Just because he knew we were in town, there was no way he could have figured out where we were staying. It’s a private rental.”
“Yeah, but how many of those were there in town?” For all Greer knew, there was only the one, and anyone could have found it.
“There were tons,” Tessa said, swiping to the page he’d last been on, still fully loaded with the pictures.
There were shots of him with the entire unit, some with him shaking hands as they emerged from the storage area, and one where he was signing an autograph.
Turned out the guys spent a lot of their downtime between calls watching fights on TV, and they wound up being big fans.
“Seriously?” Greer wondered how that was even possible.
“Seriously,” she returned as she handed back his phone. “Most of them were around the lake area, but there were dozens and dozens of rentals, and where we were booking mid-week, there was even more availability. Unless he decided to send peonies to every house listed, we’re missing something.”
Greer sat back, letting go of a small sigh of relief. Posing for pictures with fans was part of his new normal, but he hadn’t given a thought that it would make Tessa unsafe.
That was the last time he would make that mistake.
“When I booked the rental, it was on my father’s credit card, so my name wasn’t attached to it,” she said, thinking out loud. “I know my family wouldn’t have shared where we were. Do you think Troy might have called up the Antique Emporium and asked Natalie?”
“Maybe?” Greer offered. “But even if he did, did you tell her where we were staying?”
“No,” she answered immediately. “It never came up. Not once.”
Greer nodded, passing a car as he continued to try to help her unravel this mystery.
“Were you ever on any locator apps with Troy?” He knew a lot of his friends shared their location with their ladies. His roommate had his girlfriend on an app too, and it gave him some peace of mind to know where she was when he was training, and she was out in the city.
Greer could easily see Troy adding her to his circle, only to use it as a weapon to spy on her.
“Never,” Tessa said, shaking her head. “When he started asking about stuff like that, I refused. By that time, I could tell he was going to be weird with it.”
“Could he have downloaded something anyway? On your phone, do you think?”
“I got a new phone after we broke up. He wouldn’t stop calling, so I figured I’d start from scratch. New phone, new number. New everything.”
Greer took a moment as Tessa grew silent.
He knew she’d given up a ton of stuff after their breakup, including closing all of her social media accounts.
If he wasn’t trying to make a bunch of fake accounts to contact her, then she was getting messages from “friends” who were trying to encourage her to give him another chance.
It wasn’t until she started working with Andrea, and Greer was introduced to her, that she reactivated them again.
“Wait,” she said, sitting straighter in her seat. “Do you think he could have put a tracker on the car?”
Greer shook his head. “Your dad and I went over it a few days before we left. He said they hadn’t taken the car out for a while anyway, but we double-checked to make sure. Why? Did he try to do something like that before?”
“I remember finding one of those tracking tags in my purse early on,” she said.
“It wasn’t a big brand-name one, and I doubt there was a really good range on it, but it was silver and blended in with my change purse so easily that it almost slipped past me.
That was one of the reasons I knew I had to end it with him. ”