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“I remember you thought you heard a mountain lion outside the tent one night,” he said.

Her laugh filled the cab, light and musical and so familiar it made his chest feel too tight. Damn, he had missed her. How had he not realized how very much until these past few weeks?

“I’m still not convinced it wasn’t a mountain lion,” she said. “Something was breathing right outside that tent.”

“I don’t expect this trip will be nearly as exciting,” he said. “It’s mostly freeway all the way to Salt Lake.”

“Unless we get a blizzard,” she said, peering through the windshield.

A few lazy flakes drifted down now, catching in the beams of his headlights and melting on contact with the wet road. The sky ahead was a uniform gray, but nothing looked particularly ominous yet.

“Can we watch one of the movies we downloaded on our tablets?” Riley asked from the back.

“Already?” Hannah glanced over her shoulder. “We’ve been on the road, what, five minutes?”

“It’s been longer than that,” Carter said. “When we left, the clock said seven-one-five. Now it says seven-three-five.”

“I suppose that’s practically a lifetime,” Hannah murmured. “All right. Go ahead. I just hope we don’t run out of things to do in the first few hours.”

“We downloaded a ton,” Riley said in that slightly bossy tone he was starting to recognize as standard for her. “And we can always download more at the hotel. We’ll have Wi-Fi, right?”

“I imagine so. We’ll figure something out,” Hannah said, amused.

Within minutes, they pulled out their headphones and their tablets and soon the back seat had gone mostly quiet except for the occasional giggles.

In the rearview, Kodiak was curled in his crate, head down, eyes half closed. Relaxed, if not entirely asleep. A good start.

For a few miles, the cab was filled only with the sound of the engine and the swish of the tires on damp highway. This was what Wes had been afraid of. The awkward silences, the weight of things unsaid between them.

He regretted, not for the first time, giving in when Holly had looked at him with that worried-sister expression. Hannah would have managed this trip without him.

But he was here now. Too late to undo it. He might as well try to make the best of it.

“I can’t believe you don’t have some kind of practice this weekend for your big concert,” he said finally. “Seems like you never stop.”

“I was supposed to do a couple of rehearsals at the Shelter Inn,” she said. “I managed to rearrange things. Mabel Mulcahy has promised to crack the whip and make sure everyone at the Shelter Inn practices.”

He could easily picture that. Mabel had been cranky when he was a kid. Apparently retirement had only given her more opportunities to run things.

“You really love what you do.”

“Absolutely,” she said without hesitation. “I can’t imagine doing anything else.”

“It was always your dream, wasn’t it?” he said. “To go into music therapy. Combine the two things you loved—music and helping people.”

She turned her head, looking surprised. “I didn’t think you remembered that.”

“I remember a lot,” he said, then left it there. Admitting he remembered practically everything about their time together felt like too much.

“What about you?” she asked after a moment. “Are you still happy as a police officer?”

He thought about that. Happy was not a word he usually attached to the job. Satisfied, maybe. Committed, definitely.

“It wasn’t ever a childhood dream,” he said. “You know that. I kind of backed into it after everything that happened. But yeah. I’m glad I do it. There are a lot of good cops out there who genuinely want to help people. Every department has a few jerks, but they usually don’t last.”

“What’s your favorite part of the job?” she asked.

He had to think about that harder than he’d expected. “Closing a case,” he said finally. “Telling a victim we found the guy who hurt them. Or giving somebody back something they thought they had lost for good. Those days feel worth it.”