She held it for three seconds.Then she dropped her hand and picked up her keys.
“Go home,” she said.“Eat something.Three days is not the time to run yourself flat.”
“I could say the same to you.”
“I’m going home, eating leftover soup, and going to bed at nine o’clock like a person who has to be back here at six in the morning.”She unlocked her car.“Try to match that.”
He almost smiled.“I’ll try.”
“Three days.”
“Three days.”
She got in and pulled the door shut.He stood where he was until her taillights turned out of the lot onto Hospital Road.Then he walked back to his truck, got in, and sat with his hands resting on the wheel.
His forearm was still warm where her hand had been.
He drove home.
Chapter 18
She left the house at five-fifteen with the sun barely above the cypress and the password from Graham's text already memorized.
Lake Road ran east out of town, past the Barracks and the strip of sand beyond it, then narrowed where the pavement gave way to oyster-shell gravel and the live oaks closed overhead.Maren drove with both hands on the wheel and the windows cracked.A heron lifted off a culvert and tracked her car for fifty feet before peeling away over the inlet.She took the second left after the bend, the way Graham had described it on the phone — past Wes Charles's place, past the bend where the road turned toward Hidden Oasis, then down the gravel drive with the cypress trees close on either side.
The cottage came into view at the end of the drive — small, weathered, the kind of place a man chose when he wanted to be paying attention to things instead of being seen.Graham's truck was in the dirt turnaround.A second vehicle was parked behind it, an older silver Honda with a Florida plate and a back seat that held a duffel bag and a folded blanket and a thermos.
Maren parked beside the truck and sat for a moment with the engine off.
Graham came out the front door before she'd opened her own.He crossed the porch and met her halfway down the gravel, no jacket this morning, just a thermal pushed up to the elbows and his usual quiet.
"Thanks for coming early."
"You said early."
He looked at her the same as he'd looked at her in the parking lot last night — not the controlled volunteer-at-the-front-desk look, but the one underneath it.The one that had been showing through more often in the last three days than she'd seen in the previous three weeks.
"How is she?"Maren asked.
"She's been ready to leave town since I sat down across from her yesterday afternoon.She didn't."
"Because?"
"Because I told her about you."
They walked up the porch steps together.The screen door creaked when he held it open.The cottage smelled like coffee and the faint resin of cypress and a woodstove that hadn't been lit since spring.
* * *
Rose Embry was sitting at the kitchen table with both hands wrapped around a mug she hadn't lifted.
She was mid-forties, dark-haired, with the kind of stillness that didn't come from calm.It came from practice.She wore jeans and a long-sleeved gray T-shirt, and her hair was pulled back in a low knot the way Maren wore hers on shift.Her eyes moved to Maren the moment she crossed the threshold — quick, methodical, the assessment of a woman who had learned to read a room before deciding whether she could stay in it.
The assessment landed on Maren's hands first.Then her face.
"You're the one who stayed," Rose said.
"I'm the one who stayed."
