Page 50 of Undertow

“So the crash didn’t hurt her badly.”

“Or it did and she’s tougher than the injury.” Wade knelt at a drainage ditch, reading a partial print. “You know anyone like that?”

She didn’t answer.

The trail went cold at a creek crossing. Footprints to the water’s edge, then nothing. She’d walked in the creek to kill her tracks.

Wade stood at the bank for a long time. Reading the water, the rocks, both banks. Nothing.

“Smart,” he said, respectfully. One survivor recognizing another.

At the creek, it hit her.

What was the endgame? Not just for the case—for this. The thing they’d built. Helping people felt like purpose. But they couldn’t keep running off-the-books investigations out of rental houses and bakery basements forever. No legal standing. No funding. No plan for when the case ended and everyone went back to lives that might not exist anymore.

And Gabe. The word he’d said in the parking lot—stay—still sat in her chest like something swallowed wrong. How could she pursue a man she couldn’t be honest with? He didn’t know who she was. Not the name she was born with, not the things she’d done, not the federal warrant that would unravel everything. She couldn’t say stay when staying meant building on a lie. She couldn’t say I want you when the woman he wanted didn’t exist.

And the worst part—standing at this creek, cold climbing through her boots—was understanding Elena completely. A woman alone. Running. With no one to trust.

Cara had built a bakery and a team and something that looked like a life. But underneath it, she was still in the concrete pipe. Still running. Still surviving on borrowed names and iron discipline—a woman who’d taught herself not to need anyone.

The creek ran. The trees dripped. The trail was gone.

They didn’t talk on the walk back. Two people who understood that sometimes the work was the conversation.

At the car, Wade stopped to look back at the tree line.

“She’s smart. Tough. Staying alive. That means she has a plan. We just haven’t figured out what it is yet.”

Wade was right. Elena had a plan.

Cara didn’t. Not for the case, the team, Gabe. Not for any of it.

She got in the car and closed her eyes.

Lord, I don’t know where she is. I don’t know where I am either. But You do. And right now, that’ll have to be enough.

Somewhere behind them, the creek ran on, carrying Elena’s tracks to the ocean.

26

Wade navigated the last half mile of rutted road back to the rental. His knee had stiffened on the drive — she could see it in his grip on the steering wheel, the way he shifted his weight at every pothole.

Their search had been a bust.

She'd been so sure they were close — Wade reading the ground with that quiet certainty, the tracks fresh enough that the rain hadn't erased them yet. But then the water had swallowed the trail, and they were standing in the creek with nothing. Again.

Maybe it was time to stop. They were getting nowhere. Three leads, three dead ends. And Pirelli was missing now, too.

The worst was the threat to Piper. And Gabe having to take leave to protect her — oh, he hadn't said as much, but Cara knew what she was looking at. A man dismantling his career for a case that had given them nothing but bruises and dead air.

Elena Whitfield had resources at her disposal that Cara couldn't begin to imagine. Family money. Connections. A name that opened doors. For all Cara knew, the woman was on a beach in Brazil by now.

Maybe it was time to stop pretending. Stop pretending she was anything but a small-town baker with borrowed courage and a borrowed name. Stop pretending this team was anything but a group of damaged people playing at something they had no authority or funding or future to sustain. Stop pretending this whatever-it-was with Gabe could be anything but a pending train wreck — a man who deserved honesty falling for a woman who couldn't give it to him, headed for the kind of collision that left wreckage on both sides.

She needed to stop. All of it. Just — stop.

Wade turned into the driveway. The house looked tired.