“Are you sure?”
“No. Nervous as hell about it, to be honest.” He lowered his head, a humble gesture. “I don’t think I’ll ever be sure, though,” he said, looking her in the eyes once more. “So let’s do this.”
Her breath left her chest in a rush and she couldn’t get it back for a second.
“Where do we begin, Detective?”
She tried not to smile too much. This was serious, and his mother had just been buried.
“We’ll begin at the beginning. We have to look for a missing newborn around the time of that flash flood, upstream from where you wound up. That location, I hope, is in your mother’s diaries. It shouldn’t be hard. We’ll start with the internet.” She saw the hesitation in his eyes, then added, “But not tonight. I need to hit the treadmill and then the shower.”
“No way am I working offmydessert,” he said and rubbed his belly like an older, fatter man might do. “I want to keep it for a while. So when do we start, then?”
Tomorrow sprang to her lips, but she didn’t let it escape. “I’ll call you,” she said.
“Okay,” he replied. Then he looked at her for a long moment, blinked slowly, and gripped the doorknob again. “Thanks, Camellia. It was nice to not go home to the empty house tonight.”
“For me, too, what with Mom’s suddenly early ladies’ club meeting.”
“Yeah.” He laughed softly, opened the door, and went outside. “Thank your mom for me, too.”
“Goodnight, Wolf,” she said, and closed the door.
Wolf
Wolf went home, but it didn’t feel like home. It felt like a lie. The place was empty and lifeless without his mom.
Under the spray of a hot shower, he replayed the day. He’d done a bone-headed thing tonight, telling Camellia to go ahead with the search for his missing family. He hadn’t intended to. He’d been debating whether he ever would. But something had happened.
She’d made him laugh on the worst day of his life, and he’d felt something between them. As if the sounds of their laughter had intertwined and woven themselves together.
And then she laid down the law about having no interest in men, and he’d realized not letting her help him meant not seeing her again at all, maybe. And that had instigated panic.
Telling her to go ahead and find his birth family had been a knee-jerk reaction. And now he was committed. Or maybe heshould becommitted.
Maybe it would be all right, though. Maybe she wouldn’t find anything. He hoped to God she didn’t find anything. But maybe…it would take a little time for her to give up, and in the meantime…
What?
He didn’t know. He wondered if pretending he wanted to find his family just to get to see her again would put him in the same category as her stalker-ex in her eyes. It had been stupid.
He hadn’t been lying when he’d told her he was in no shape to be thinking about women right now, but he was thinking about her.
He wondered about that. Her history, the ex. It must’ve been bad to have her swearing off men forever. He wondered what theguy had done to her and felt a darkness cross his soul. Then he realized that thinking about Camellia had distracted him from thinking about the rug being ripped from underneath his own life. He couldn’t remember feeling such an instant interest in a woman before.
Maybe it was good that she’d drawn a boundary line between them. It was protecting him from himself.
It wasn’t lost on him that she was the first woman in his life since the most important one had left it. Maybe that was all this was.
He toweled down and went to bed, but he knew he’d never sleep. So he returned to the unfinished diary on his nightstand.
Cilla
August 11
I’ve been digging through some of the cargo to pass the time. I found a box of aluminum baseball bats stacked top to bottom, and there were multiple boxes just like it. Another one has golf clubs packed in individual Styrofoam forms like they’re precious. But the best thing I found was camping gear. No food, no clothes. I wish there’d been time to grab some clothes from my bedroom. I keep thinking about all my stuff, all my jeans, my jacket, my shoes.
Anyway, I found a case full of tents in sacks that seem way too small to hold one. I took one. It says “two-person dome tent” on the front. Found a sleeping bag, too, still in shrink wrap. It’smarked “teen” and covered in Mutant Ninja Turtles. There are crates of them.
