Page 41 of Undertow

Tom and Reagan exchanged a glance. Quick. Loaded.

“The photos,” Tom said. “Tell me everything.”

Gabe walked them through it. The envelope appearing on the counter.

“I’m pulling her out,” Tom repeated. “Tonight. I’m not asking.”

“Tom.” Cara kept her voice level, the voice she used to use in rooms where the wrong inflection could collapse a negotiation—or get someone killed. “Running is exactly what they want.”

His eyes snapped to hers. “You don’t know that.”

“I do know that. Because they didn’t take her. They sent photos.” She let that land. “If they wanted to grab Piper, they’ve had days. They didn’t. They want you scared. They want you to do exactly what you’re doing: react, run, pull the best digital asset this team has off the board.”

“She’s my daughter.”

“And I know that whoever sent those photos can find her again. New state, new name—it doesn’t matter. Not with the resources these people have. The only way to make Piper safe—actually safe, permanently safe—is to finish this.”

Tom’s hands were on the table, flat, pressing down like he could hold himself in place through sheer physical force.

Wade spoke from the couch. “You run, they know they can move you. You stay, they know they can’t.”

Reagan put her hand on Tom’s arm and didn’t say anything. Didn’t offer comfort or logic or strategy. Just her hand on his forearm, steady and present, and Tom didn’t pull away. He closed his eyes. His jaw worked. The seconds stretched into something that felt like minutes while a father decided whether to trust five people with his daughter’s life.

Beside her, across two hundred miles of screen, she could feel Gabe holding his.

Tom opened his eyes. Looked at the screen. At Gabe. “If anything happens to her⁠—”

“Nothing’s going to happen to her.” Gabe’s voice. The cop voice. The one that didn’t negotiate or speculate or hedge.

Tom nodded. Once. The smallest, hardest nod Cara had ever seen.

“I’ll bring her up,” Gabe said. “We’ll leave now. I’ll take leave from the department. I can get Piper out of Haven Cove without it looking like an emergency—school break, family trip, whatever story works,” Gabe said. “And I’ll stay. You’ll need more eyes on her.”

Tom stared at him through the screen. The look on his face was something Cara couldn’t name—gratitude, terror, and the raw vulnerability of a man letting someone else carry the thing he couldn’t.

“Tom,” Gabe said, quieter now. “She’ll be okay.”

Tom’s hand moved over Reagan’s on his arm—a squeeze, brief and hard. The first time Cara had seen him reach for someone instead of retreating into his screens.

“Yeah,” Tom said, voice wrecked. “Yeah. Fine.”

Gabe disconnected to make his calls—Tyler Price, the city council, whatever story he’d construct to explain why the acting chief of Haven Cove PD needed leave effective immediately.

Tom walked to the bathroom and closed the door.

Reagan stared at the closed door for three full seconds. Then she opened her laptop again and went back to work with the intensity of a woman holding herself together by holding onto the task in front of her.

Wade caught Cara’s eye from the couch. Neither of them said anything.

Cara pressed her palm flat against her bruised ribs and breathed through the ache.

Lord, keep her safe. Keep all of them safe. And if You’ve got a plan in all of this—I could really use a sign that it’s not just chaos.

Outside, the rain started. Quiet at first, then steady—the Oregon kind, the kind that settled in and stayed, the kind that made you understand why everything up here was green. It ran down the windows and blurred the tree line and turned the world into something soft and gray and patient, as if the weather, at least, had all the time in the world.

21

The house had three bedrooms, one bathroom, and six people who were not good at sharing space. Or maybe that was just Gabe.