Page 46 of Undertow

“So we’re stalled,” Cara said.

“On everything.”

The rain thickened. A car pulled into the lot, headlights sweeping across the windshield.

Cara was quiet for a moment. “Are you going to apply for the permanent chief position?”

There it was. The question that had been sitting on the kitchen table in Haven Cove for weeks, printed on paper he’d never filled out, carried in the weight of a badge he’d stopped putting on.

“The deadline’s coming up,” he said.

“That’s not what I asked.”

No. It wasn’t. And the honest answer was that he’d already decided—had decided the moment he’d called Tyler Price and told him he was taking leave. But saying it made it real, and real meant explaining why, and why led to the woman sitting three feet from him in a dark parking lot, and that was a road he wasn’t sure either of them was ready to take.

“I don’t know,” he said.

She heard the lie. Cara was too good to miss a lie, even a gentle one. Especially a gentle one.

“Haven Cove needs a real chief,” she said. “Not an interim.”

“So you think I should apply?” he said.

“You’re good at it.”

“That’s not what I asked.”

The rain filled the silence. Inside the Thai restaurant, someone laughed.

Cara turned away, looking out her window at the blurred parking lot. In the glass, he caught her reflection—the set of her jaw, her hand drifting to her ribs.

“How are they?” he asked.

“Fine.”

“Cara.”

“They’re bruised. They’ll heal.”

“You took a fall down a twenty-foot slope and hid in a creek bed.”

“And I’m sitting in a car waiting for pad thai. I’m fine, Gabe.”

He let it go. Not because he believed her, but because pushing Cara was like pushing a door that only opened from the other side. You could stand there all day. She’d open it when she was ready, or she wouldn’t, and either way the pushing only made it worse.

“You didn’t answer my question,” she said. Quieter now. Still facing the window.

“You didn’t answer mine.”

“What question?”

“Whether you want me to stay.”

He hadn’t meant to say it.

“I didn’t ask you to come up here,” she said.

“No. You didn’t.”