Page 55 of Her Forever SEAL

Lettie looked down at the papers under her palm. She was quiet for a long moment.

“What if she says she can't get proof?” Lettie asked. “What if she says Bree is fine but she can't—what if she won't⁠—”

“Then you stand up and you tell her you'll be back when she can.” Sophia kept her voice steady. “You do not give her anything without getting something first. Are you clear on that?”

Lettie lifted her chin. The exhaustion was still there, the weeks of it carved into her face, but underneath it something had shifted. Something that looked like the particular fury of a woman who has run out of patience for being afraid.

“Clear,” she said.

Sophia got to the Bay Brew twenty minutes before Lettie was due.

She ordered a water and a cookie from the college-age girl at the register, things that didn’t require her to interact with Mary, and paid cash. Then she settled at a table against the side wall with a clear sightline to the counter without being directly in the eyeline of anyone working it. She had her phone out. She looked like a woman with somewhere to be in an hour. Nothing more.

She did not look up when Mary came out from the back.

She didn't need to. She could track her in her peripheral vision. Mary was efficient, someone comfortable in their space. Sophia heard her voice briefly, warm and unhurried, greeting someone at the counter.

She looked at her phone and waited.

Lettie came through the door at eight fifty-one.

Sophia watched her from behind her reading glasses and did not move. Lettie stood just inside the entrance for a moment, her bag over her shoulder. Her spine was straight. She was a woman with a purpose.

She didn't go to the counter to order. Her eyes zeroed in on Mary, and she walked directly toward her.

Sophia watched Mary register Lettie's approach. Something in her posture shifted. She said something to the other barista and came around the end of the counter.

They didn't go to the corner table immediately. There was a brief exchange standing up, with Lettie saying something low and Mary's head tilting slightly. Then Mary gestured toward the corner and they sat.

There was no hope of Sophia hearing them with all the ambient noise, but she took note of the careful stillness of Lettie's hands on the table. The way she leaned in. The way that Mary’s brows raised.

Sophia watched Lettie talk. Watched her keep her voice low and her back straight and her eyes steady on Mary. Watched Mary's expression stay pleasantly composed, the warmth that Sophia now understood was simply what her face did when she was working. And she watched the slight pause when Lettie finished speaking.

From where Sophia was sitting, she could see Lettie’s right leg shaking. That was it, the only outward sign that she was nervous.

Good for her.

Mary shook her head.

Lettie pushed back from the table, and Mary grabbed her wrist. Then she nodded at Lettie, and Lettie sat back down.

Mary took out her phone and made a call, her eyes focused on Lettie the entire time. Sophia watched her lips move. Watched as she listened. Watched her lips move again. And again. She was clearly arguing with someone. Finally, she nodded.

Sophia had her phone out. She texted Lydia so that they could do the scan. Maybe, God willing, pinpoint the call here in the coffee shop, and trace it back to its origin.

Mary set her phone down on the table and Lettie looked down at it. Waiting. Willing it to ring. Sophia counted. She reached the number eighty-six. The phone rang.

Mary pressed something, and the relief that crossed Lettie’s face was a thing of beauty. She tried to pick up the phone and Mary pulled it away, shaking her head. Lettie bit her lip and nodded. She kept it together. God bless her, she kept it together.

Then Mary reached into her pocket and set her phone on the table between them, screen up.

Lettie looked at the phone. She didn't touch it. She looked at it for a long time—long enough that Sophia felt the seconds accumulate in her own chest—and then she reached into her bag and pulled out her own phone.

She navigated to something. Turned it to face Mary. Mary looked at the screen without touching it, scrolling through the images with one finger, unhurried, the way you looked at something you had been waiting a long time to see.

Then she nodded.

Mary then gave her an expectant look. Lettie pulled out her phone, and Sophia’s phone buzzed.