Page 49 of Her Forever SEAL

The room went quiet.

“What do you mean?” Sophia asked.

“I mean the investment doesn't match the objective. Schematics for a prototype helicopter—that's valuable, yes. But this much groundwork, this many people, this many months of preparation?” She shook her head. “Someone spent serious money and serious time on this operation. The schematics are real. The pressure on Lettie and Peggy is real. But I think they're a means to an end, not the end itself.”

“So what's the end?” Angie asked.

“I don't know yet.” She said it flatly, without apology. “But I'm going to find out.”

Sophia looked at the whiteboard. At the careful block printing, the map with its red circle sitting squarely over Eastlake Vistas, the diagram of roles and connecting lines. All of it was real and solid and actionable. And underneath all of it was something none of them could see yet.

“Keep going,” she said.

Lydia nodded and went back to her laptop.

They wrapped up twenty minutes later. Angie to the Mathnasium in the morning. Lydia on the tower data and property records. Rylie waiting on her contact. They left separately, the same way they'd arrived.

Sophia was the last out the door.

She drove to Beth’s house and picked up her girls, the entire time thinking about what Lydia had said. The investment doesn't match the objective. She turned it over the same way she turned over everything she wasn't ready to say out loud yet. She teased at the threads, pulling carefully, not forcing, letting the pieces find each other on their own.

She listened to her daughters the best she could, then hustled them to bed. But before turning out the lights, she stood in Kayla's doorway in the dark and listened to her breathe, and then Lisa's, and then she went to the kitchen and made tea she wouldn't drink and sat at the island.

She waited for Mason's window to open, needing to hear his voice. Maybe to even tell him what was going on. But he didn’t call.

She went to bed, but she didn’t sleep.

Her phone buzzed before five in the morning.

Rylie.

She answered immediately.

“My contact came back,” Rylie said with the particular tone in her voice that meant she was controlling something carefully. “The operational signature matches a network she's been tracking for two years. They've moved girls through San Diego before. Twice that she knows of.” A pause. “She has a name attached to it. I don't want to say it on the phone.”

Sophia closed her hand around her mug.

“How soon can you get here?” she asked.

“Twenty minutes.”

“I'll make coffee.”

She hung up and sat very still in her quiet kitchen. Outside the window the canyon was just beginning to go gray at the edges.

She thought about Bree. About where she was right now, whether she was cold, scared. About whether she knew that a room full of women had spent last night deciding to come for her.

She thought about fifty hours.

No. Forty-two now.

She got up and made the coffee.

15

Mandy wasn't there.

Kayla clocked it in the first thirty seconds of warm-ups, the absence of her like a blank spot where a tooth should be that the tongue keeps finding. Coach Delgado hadn't said anything. Nobody had asked. Tuesday, that would have surprised her. Nothing surprised her anymore.