Page 26 of Devoured By the Forbidden Mountain Man

His fingers turned beneath mine and held for a moment before I stood.

By the time I reached the loft, my heartbeat had climbed again.

I put the kettle on because holding a mug seemed preferable to holding nothing, then arranged my phone against the small stand I used for video calls. Meredith had agreed to talk, not specifically to video, but when I sent a quick message asking whether she minded, her answer came almost immediately.

MEREDITH: Video is okay. Give me one minute.

The kettle clicked off.

I made tea I barely wanted, carried it to the table, and sat beneath the warm pool of light from the lamp.

Her call came at six eleven, and I answered.

For the first second, the camera showed only a pale kitchen wall and part of a wooden cabinet. Then Meredith adjusted the phone, and the woman Gavin had worried about seven years ago came into focus.

She was quietly pretty, with shoulder-length light-brown hair and gray-blue eyes that looked paler on the screen. Her face had filled out from the old photograph in Rex’s file, softening around her cheeks, and the loose oatmeal-colored sweater she wore stretched over the unmistakable curve of pregnancy.

Children’s artwork crowded the refrigerator behind her. Construction paper leaves, a lopsided orange cat, a page covered in purple handprints. A plastic cup full of crayons sat near one end of the kitchen table.

The normalcy of it reached me before anything she said. Meredith had a home, a family, and a life that had kept moving after Gavin’s stopped.

“Georgia,” she said, and hearing my name in her voice made the seven years between then and now seem suddenly thin. “I’m glad you called. I almost talked myself out of answering your message.”

“I almost talked myself out of sending it, so I guess we’re even.”

A small smile appeared, then faded.

Somewhere beyond the kitchen, a child protested loudly about pajamas. Meredith glanced over her shoulder, and her expression changed with such easy maternal affection that my chest tightened.

“My husband has bedtime duty tonight. We have a five-year-old who believes pajamas violate his civil liberties and a three-year-old who supports him on principle.”

The humor in her voice was gentle.

“And another one coming,” I said.

Her hand moved instinctively over the curve of her stomach. “In January. Apparently two children and twenty-three third graders weren’t keeping me busy enough.”

“You teach third grade?”

“For six years now.” Meredith’s smile returned briefly. “Some days I’m not sure whether school prepared me for parenting or parenting prepared me for school.”

For a few minutes we stayed in the present. She asked whether I still lived in Whispering Pines. I told her I had never really left. She remembered me as Gavin’s little sister and apologized immediately when I reminded her I was twenty-eight.

The ordinary conversation helped, but it also made what I needed to ask harder.

I wrapped both hands around my tea even though it had barely cooled enough to drink.

“I found your name yesterday because I’m working for Rex McCord now.”

Meredith’s face changed at the name, not dramatically, but enough that I saw it.

“He still has Gavin’s file?”

“Yes. Rex never liked the way Gavin disappeared, so he kept the old recovery material.” I watched her closely without trying to make the attention feel predatory. “Your name stood out because I remembered Gavin talking about you before Brad died.”

Her gaze dropped to the table.

“What did he say?”