Willa pulled back with a tired smile. “Let me get cleaned up and then eat something. I’m starving.”
“I’ll warm your food and make you some tea,” June offered.
“That would be wonderful.” Willa breathed thankfully.
Twenty minutes later, June sat across the kitchen table from her daughter, watching Willa eat with the focused intensity of someone who’d been too busy to remember food for most of the day.
“Was anyone hurt in the fire?” June asked.
“A few minor injuries, mostly smoke inhalation,” Willa replied between bites. “Could have been much worse if it had spread toward the residential areas.”
“Do they know how it started?” June’s brow furrowed curiously.
Willa’s expression darkened slightly. “It was an illegal camper. Someone set up in the forest without permission and didn’t properly extinguish their campfire.”
“That’s terribly irresponsible.” June’s brows shot up, a shudder running through her that she had to suppress as the thought rushed through her mind?Isn’t that how the fire ten years ago was started?
“The problem is, we can’t find whoever was camping there,” Willa continued. “They vanished so we couldn’t question them. Either they evacuated when they saw the fire spreading, or...”
“Or they’re still missing,” June finished, understanding the implication.
“Exactly. We’ll have search and rescue teams out there at first light.” Willa suppressed a yawn.
They talked for a few more minutes about the response efforts and Willa’s team, but June could see exhaustion weighing heavily on her daughter’s shoulders. As Willa finished her meal, she suddenly looked up with a puzzled expression.
“Mom,” Willa said, her brow furrowed in concentration. “Have I met Director Dillinger before?”
June’s heart stuttered. “No, sweetheart, not that I know of. Why do you ask?”
The answer that came next sent shockwaves through June’s already fragile composure.
“Because when I met him today, he seemed so familiar to me. Like I’d seen his face somewhere before, but I can’t place where.” Willa’s brow furrowed thoughtfully.
June stared at her daughter, slightly stunned. “Maybe he just has one of those faces,” she said weakly.
“Maybe,” Willa said, but she didn’t sound convinced. “It’s strange, though. Usually I’m good with faces.”
June forced herself to smile and changed the subject, but inside, her mind was racing.
As she helped Willa clean up and said goodnight, June couldn’t shake the feeling that her peaceful summer of recovery was about to become something far more complicated and unsettling than she’d ever imagined.
The truth, it seemed, had a way of surfacing no matter how deeply you tried to bury it.
14
HOLT
As Holt pulled away from Willa’s house, his hands gripped the steering wheel of his son’s pickup truck with unnecessary force. The quiet hum of the engine and the distant sound of emergency vehicles provided the only soundtrack to his churning thoughts as he drove back toward the fire scene.
Thirty-eight years. Thirty-eight years since he’d last seen June Carter face to face, and now here they were in the same small town where their story had begun, their lives intertwined in ways he never could have imagined. The irony wasn’t lost on him that fate had brought them back to Sandpiper Shores, the place where they’d first fallen in love as teenagers.
His mind drifted to all the times over the decades when he’d looked her up, unable to resist the pull of curiosity about what had happened to the woman who’d been his first and greatest love. Each time, he’d told himself it was just a professional habit, the investigator in him unable to leave questions unanswered. But the truth was more complicated than that.
The worst discovery had come not even eighteen months after their divorce was finalized. June had remarried. Not only that,but she’d had a child. The knowledge had hit him like a physical blow, sitting alone in his FBI office, staring at a computer screen that showed June, married and a mother.
Had that been the problem all along? Children?Holt ran a hand through his hair, remembering his younger self’s certainty that they needed to wait five years, maybe more, until their careers were established before starting a family.Had June wanted children sooner than he’d been willing to give them? Had she found someone who could offer her what he couldn’t?
The questions had haunted him for decades, especially after his own son was born two years into his marriage to Lillian. By then, it was too late to wonder if he’d made the wrong choice, too late to second-guess the path that had led him away from June and toward a different life entirely.
