“So you don’t think I’m crazy?”
Gabe looked at the woman seated across from him. She looked like she belonged here, he thought. The little mouse was definitely gone, and this woman exuded a quiet sort of class that befitted the subtle elegance and style of the Redstone flagship.
He gave himself a mental shake; he knew he was rattled when he spent so much time dwelling on the presence of a woman he’d known for years instead of the stunning bit of the past he held in his hand.
“Crazy?” he asked.
“For thinking this—” she gestured at the postcard “—means something. More than just the post office needs a little work.”
He smiled at the quip, grateful to her for lightening the mood a bit. But the truth of what she said was undeniable, as was the weight of it. They now knew what they’d never been able to determine before, where Hope had gone that day. Or at least, the direction she’d gone.
“We never even got close to looking here,” he said, tapping the card against his palm.
“There was no reason to,” Cara said reasonably. “Hope wasn’t a mountain wilderness, back-to-nature kind of person. She never even mentioned this place, at least not to me.”
“Or me,” Gabe said.
“I…” She stopped, and he shifted his gaze to her face. For the first time he saw a trace of the old, hesitant girl he’d remembered.
“What?”
“I wasn’t sure you’d even want to know, after all this time.”
“Want to know? Whether my wife was abducted, killed or just plain walked out on me?”
The words burst from him so fervently it startled him. It had always been there for the last eight years, this gnawing question, but he thought he’d managed to successfully blunt the edges of it by keeping it buried deep.
Apparently not, he thought wryly.
“Why on earth would she have walked out on you?”
“For someone else?” he suggested.
“Oh, please.”
Cara seemed sincerely astonished at the idea, which mollified his fervor and soothed the tangled emotions he didn’t like admitting to.
“You don’t think so?” He hadn’t really been convinced himself, if for no other reason than Hope had never contacted her parents. Even knowing they wouldn’t have approved of an affair, he couldn’t picture her leaving them worrying endlessly.
“Hardly. She was foolish sometimes, but not a fool.”
That surprised him; he’d thought Cara considered Hope the feminine ideal, in the way somewhat plain girls sometimes idolized their more glamorous sisters. Not that Cara was plain, at least, certainly not anymore.
“We’d had our…moments,” he said, somewhat hastily.
“I know that. But I also know she was happy, in those last days. Very.”
“When I told her I was leaving the navy, she…seemed that way. She called it…a miracle,” he said, only now realizing she’d used the word on that postcard as well. But what was the second miracle she’d written about?
Cara gave him a look then that he couldn’t quite interpret. It seemed almost sad, although about what he couldn’t guess.
“She was happy,” she said. “I know that card seems like her same old griping about you being gone, but she really had lightened up about it, after you said you were leaving. I couldn’t believe it.”
His brow furrowed as he looked at her. “You couldn’t believe what?”
“I was…shocked. I never thought you’d really do it. I thought you loved the navy.”
Those quiet words jabbed at him. He looked down at the card, not to read it again—he already had the words committed to memory—but in order not to look at Cara and see the look he now recognized as pity, or something close enough to it that it rankled.
“I never thought you’d give in to her…whining.”
Whining? An odd word for her to use to describe her best friend’s discontent, he thought, and his gaze flicked back to her face.
“Is that what you think? That I quit because my wife nagged me into it?”
“It seemed that way.” She had the grace to look uncomfortable. “On the surface,” she added, in a conciliatory tone.
“Thanks for that much,” he muttered.
“You’re still in uniform, of a sort,” she said.
He glanced down at the red polo shirt he wore, with the Redstone logo—a graphic of the Hawk I, the small jet that had begun an empire—on the left chest. Paired with crisp khakis, just as the rest of the crew wore, it was a uniform without looking like one.
“Josh doesn’t go in much for formality.”
“I’ve read about him,” she said. “He seems almost too good to be true.”
Grateful for the change of subject, Gabe nodded. “Anybody else, I’d probably agree with you. Not Josh. He started with nothing and built Redstone the hard way, one brick at a time, with his own hands. One person at a time, with his own judgment.”
She studied him for a moment. “You’re happy here,” she finally said.
“Yes,” he agreed. “I’ve got a great boat under me, and better, I answer to a man I respect completely.”
It was as close as he’d come to the real reason he’d left the navy, and he wasn’t about to come any closer with this woman he hadn’t seen in years.
He turned his attention back to the postcard. “It was mailed at eleven-twenty, according to the postage label meter. About the time it would take to get up there if she left where we lived then in San Diego at nine.”
“And Hope rarely got herself moving to go anywhere before nine,” Cara agreed.
This third dig was too much for Gabe to ignore. “I always had the idea Hope could do no wrong in your book.”
Cara shrugged. “Time was,” she said. “But a funny thing happened. I grew up.”
Gabe’s breath caught as she put her finger on the very thing that had always bothered him; Hope hadn’t seemed inclined to do that at all. She’d wanted the carefree life she’d always had, and hadn’t been happy with one reality had presented her. But she’d been so alive and vibrant that everyone had accepted it as just part of her unique charm.
“Don’t get me wrong,” Cara hastened to add, “I love her. She was the sister I never had, and I’ll always feel that way about her.”
Gabe
