Page 21 of Undertow

And now the man was heading to Portland. Where Cara was.

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 It was small and shabby: two bedrooms and an outdated kitchen complete with battle-scarred table.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.