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Blue scanned it, then looked at her again, blankly. And somehow that kicked her back into gear. She reached over and pointed at the piece of paper lying on the top of her desk, in between different stacks of bills.
It was card stock, as if someone had torn off the top of a folded greeting card to use it as a makeshift postcard. And it had only one sentence on it.
Gone on trip with new guy—back soon.
“That’s Rebecca’s handwriting,” Everly managed to say, as if her heart weren’t a sledgehammer in her chest. “And, Blue. It wasn’t here when I left.”
Nine
Blue had never intended to return to Chicago. He hadn’t been avoiding it, necessarily, but he hadn’t made any effort to visit his hometown. He’d been too busy with the SEALs and then doing his thing with Alaska Force—but he knew that wasn’t the truth. Or at least not the whole truth.
He liked the city of Chicago well enough. There were pros and cons to any urban sprawl. The pros were usually the good food, with more variety to choose from; all hours or more hours of entertainment; and always more people around to make a life feel anonymous. But the cons were all those same people, everywhere, and the traffic they made. All the concrete and the trash. Cities left a man with no space to breathe.
Blue wasn’t sure he was cut out for any city after all his years in the service. He didn’t like crowds. He knew too much to relax in them. The problem withChicago, specifically, was that it was much too close to his family.
Blue didn’t want to deal with family. He didn’t want to talk to his mother any more than he already did. A call every now and again, when he wasn’t on a mission, kept up the mirage of the mother-son relationship they’d never had. The truth was, they had nothing to say to each other. Blue had gone off and done his thing. His mother had stayed right where he’d left her. He’d made his feelings on that pretty clear when he’d been a teenager stuck in that same house with her and her bad choices. Why belabor the point now?
He had zero interest in speaking to the man she’d married a scant year after Blue’s father had died. The seven years he’d spent under his stepfather’s roof had been more than enough. Blue knew his stepsisters were both fine, in their way, now that they were grown up and off on their own, because his mother liked to fill the silence in their phone calls with random chatter about what Kelsey was doing these days over in Akron, or what Lauren had gotten up to lately in Milwaukee. Blue didn’t have anything against either one of them. He just didn’t have anythingforthem.
Blue never thought about any of this stuff. Deliberately. He didn’t give it any head space because it wasn’t an issue for him. He didn’t care if he had a relationship with his family. He didn’t appreciate the fact that being back in Chicago made him feel like he was backsliding, way back into those dim high school days when he’d wanted to escape but hadn’t understood how he could make that happen.When he’d had no perspective andhadn’t realized how easy it would be to simply leave home and never go back.
Coming back to Chicago was like signing up for an unpleasant trip down memory lane, but that wasn’t the only problem.
The other, bigger, unsolvable problem was Everly.
He hadn’t quite gotten a handle on her situation, which pissed him off more by the day. The letter from the missing roommate, with handwriting Everly insisted looked like Rebecca’s, was a curveball.
The note wasn’t the only indication that Rebecca might still be out there. It had taken Blue only a couple of calls to the Chicago PD the following morning to discover that there had been a lot of activity in the previous week. In addition to the note on Everly’s desk, there had been an e-mail to Rebecca’s workplace, talking vaguely of a last-minute leave of absence, for personal reasons left undisclosed.
“Not to mention,” the detective Blue had spoken to had said, “dead girls don’t generally update their social media.”
Rebecca had done just that. Or she’d appeared to do it. There were three posts in the last week, all similar. Short, vague, cheerful. With a few gauzy promises that all would be revealed in time. And no replies to any questions asked in the comments.
“I don’t want to tell you how to run your life,” the detective told Blue after he’d identified himself as a representative of Everly’s legal team, in a tone of voice that indicated she wanted to do exactly that. “But your client is a nutcase.”
“I’ll take that informed opinion under advisement,” Blue had replied dryly.
And he was tempted to leave it at that, suggest Everly seek out intensive therapy and good drugs, and haul his ass back to Grizzly Harbor as fast as he could.
That right there was the issue.
Because Blue couldn’t explain the flurry of messages from Everly’s lost roommate, but he knew people. He knew straight-up panic when he saw it, and that was exactly what Everly had been trying so hard to hide when they’d arrived back at her apartment. That was the part he couldn’t reconcile.
If she really was the nutcase the police thought she was, he’d expect a whole lot more drama. Grand gestures like the one she made by driving out to Alaska, sure. Anyone could fake a good story, he supposed. Even to a dubious, suspicious audience like Blue and the rest of Alaska Force. Anyone could be fooled, given the right set of circumstances. He knew that.
But it was a lot harder to fake the physical manifestations of fear. The way Everly had held herself, as if she were trying to make herself smaller. Less of a target. He’d seen the hair stand up on the back of her neck when she’d walked toward the front of her building, and when she’d looked at him, her pupils had been dilated. A fine sheen of sweat had broken out on her lip as she approached her own front door, though the hall had been air-conditioned and cold. And then there’d been the quick, shallow breathing she’d fought to keep quiet.
She kept thinking she could hide things from him. She kept trying to cover up her responses, even when they were obvious, and he didn’t think it was part of agame she was trying to play with him. He’d expect that level of manipulation from someone in his line of work, maybe. But Everly didn’t have a drop of special ops instinct in her body.
So when Blue’s first knee-jerk response to the notion Rebecca might be alive and sending notes all over the place was to pack up and get the hell away from Everly, he found it... disappointing.
Because the only reason he had for wanting to do that made him a giant dick.
Literally.
Blue knew the truth about himself. He didn’t pretend to be the hero people usually didn’t try to call him more than once. But he did try to be the best man that he could be at any given moment, and that did not include jumping the bones of a scared, desperate woman who was caught up in the middle of something neither she nor Blue himself could understand.
He couldn’t believe it was even an issue.