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He dragged his chair up to the bed and sat. He was tired too, and grubbier than he liked. It was also impossible not to worry about what would happen to him now that he’d left his team on the mountain.
He shoved all that out of his mind and caught the woman’s gaze. Her eyes were deep blue, like sapphires. But they weren’t just blue—when he looked closer, he noted a band of dark green circling each iris.
“Anything you want to tell me?” he asked.
She pushed air through her nose. “Not really.”
“Make me do it the hard way, then.” He pulled out his phone. Carson had given him her real name before he’d left the room—Whitley Newman—and Wyatt held down the microphone icon and spoke it into the search bar rather than trust his own spelling to hold up under pressure. “Whitley Newman, missing.” The results populated a second later.
He tapped the accessibility icon he kept pinned to his home screen for tasks like this, and the flat, mechanical voice took over, reading the first headline aloud between them.
She directed her glare to her hands clenched across her middle, but she didn’t stop him.
The voice read it out, stripped of any inflection that might have softened it. A missing persons alert, eight weeks old, for an unsolved disappearance of a nurse from Salt Lake City.
“Last seen leaving her apartment on Tuesday morning, according to a neighbor, though she admitted she couldn’t be sure of the exact day,” the app recited. “Whitley Newman’s car is still unaccounted for—no sightings, no traffic camera footage, almost as if she drove off the grid entirely.”
He tapped the next result, and the same flat voice picked it up without missing a beat, this one quoting an employer in Boise who said she’d never shown up for her shift.
Wyatt kept his eyes on her face instead of the screen, watching so he didn’t miss any reaction. She refused to meet his gaze. She simply listened to the account of her life reduced to a list of secondhand facts, a stranger’s story, recited in a robotic voice.
He’d given a few interviews like those they listened to and he’d spoken to families of people who were missing. He’d watched their faces crumple at details they hadn’t heard before.
But he’d never had the missing person lying two feet away.
He tapped through to another article, and the app moved on to a benefit dinner some of her coworkers had thrown a few weeks back, organized through the Rocky Mountain Traveling Nurses Coalition, raising money for a reward fund tied to any information on her whereabouts.
A photo accompanied the article, showing a banquet hall full of people in scrubs and a poster board with her face blown up twice life-size, propped near the entrance. Donation jars were lined up on a table like a school fundraiser instead of for a woman who might be dead in a ditch somewhere.
Wyatt paused the playback and looked up at her again. “People raised money for you. A chicken dinner. Strangers you probably never worked a shift with donated to find you.”
Her expression cracked, giving him a glimpse of despair and burning pain, before she smoothed it again. “I didn’t know about that.”
“Doesn’t it mean anything to you?”
“It means I have good coworkers.” Her voice wobbled. “It doesn’t change anything about why I left.”
She kept her gaze averted, hiding her true emotions about the things he’d read. He almost felt bad for using the tactic against her, even though they needed all the information to help her.
It also didn’t make him feel like less of a bastard for reading it to her.
He pressed the app to resume the article. “Her employer described her as reliable, dedicated, the kind of nurse other staff wanted on their shifts during a crisis.”
He paused the reading app again. “That sound like you?”
She jerked her hand, shifting the IV line when she moved, and he noticed the bruising already blooming around the tape. He was noticing a lot of small things about her that he had no business noticing.
The app’s flat voice read out a date buried in one of the articles, stating her last known sighting was in late April. He did the math in his head—two and a half months between the time she failed to show up for her shift and the moment he found her.
She claimed she was on the mountain for two months, but that left a couple weeks unaccounted for, though she could have easily lost track of time while surviving the tail end of a winter in extreme conditions that were far from ideal for camping.
“There was still snow on the mountain when you went in,” he said.
“I prepared for it.”
He studied her photo on the screen, a staff photo of a woman with color in her cheeks. Her hair was smooth, pulled neatly back off her face, and she wore an easy smile.
She was pretty. No—not just pretty. Beautiful in a way that couldn’t be buried under sepsis and months of rough living and hair that hadn’t seen a comb in longer than she probably wanted to think about. Still, the dreadlocks somehow fit her as much as the neat style of the woman in that photograph. And even ill, she would still stop men in their tracks.
