Page 111 of Crosscurrent

Bennion’s puddle-jumper commercial flight was a hundred yards away. Cara watched a baggage handler wheel the metal stairs up to the open cabin door. Heat, heavy with the promise of rain, already radiated off the tarmac.

"You could come with us," Cara said, already knowing the answer.

"To Oregon?" Bennion almost smiled. "And do what? Bake?"

"Stranger things have happened." Cara reached into her jacket and held out a folded slip of paper. A name, a number, a man in Baton Rouge who owed her a favor and asked no questions. "He set me up once, back when I needed to stop being who I was. New name, clean papers, a door that locks behind you. It's the only thing I've got that's worth giving you."

Bennion looked at the paper a long moment before she took it.

"Eight months I was their test case," she said. "Before that I was a wife, and a bank teller, and a woman who trusted the wrong account. Bait, leash, decoy. I've been everything to those people except a person." She folded the slip away into a pocket. "I think I'd like to try being nobody for a while. Nobody's the safest thing there is. You'd know."

"I would," Cara said.

"Then we understand each other." Bennion put out her hand, and Cara shook it, and that was the whole of the goodbye, because Bennion wasn't built for more and didn't insult either of them by pretending. She shouldered the duffel and walked off across the apron toward a life with no one in it, and she did not look back.

Some people you saved by helping them disappear.

Nomad flew the rest of them north.

Sugar & Salt smelled of cinnamon and cold ovens when they came through the door, because Diane had kept the lights on but hadn't had the heart to bake, and the first thing Cara did in her own kitchen in what felt like a year was stand in the middle of it and breathe.

The second thing she did was get tackled.

Piper came across the bakery at a dead run, hitting them like weather, all elbows and relief and sixteen years of feeling everything at full volume. She got Cara first, then Gabe, then Wade, who lifted her clean off the floor and set her down again like luggage. She was talking the whole time, a flood of it, Janelle said and the news didn't say and Diane wouldn't let me and are you hurt, is anybody, nobody will give me a straight⁠—

Then she got to Skye, and stopped.

Everyone knew you did not hug Skye. It was one of the unwritten laws of the bakery, right up there with don't touch Wade's knives and don't let Owen near the espresso machine. Skye did not do hugs. Skye had told them all that she did not do families.

Piper hugged her anyway.

For a second Skye stood with her arms held out from her sides like a woman handed something that might be alive. Cara watched her decide. Watched the staples in her side and the long terrible night and the whole armored history of her come up against one teenager who had been scared for days and was done being brave about it. And then Skye brought her arms down and let the kid hold on, and held on back, and put her face down against the top of Piper's head so nobody could see it.

"You're okay," Piper said, muffled, fierce. "You have to be okay."

"I'm okay," Skye said. And for once it didn't sound like a tactical assessment. It sounded like a promise.

Agent supervised from the back counter. The cat had spent the team's entire absence being hand-fed albacore by Diane and had plainly concluded the household ran better without most of its members underfoot. He waited until the hugging concluded, then descended, wound once around every set of ankles to reestablish the chain of command, and sat on the exact center of the prep table where no food was permitted, daring anyone to make it a thing.

"Don't," Diane told the room, coming around the register with a dish towel over her shoulder and her eyes suspiciously bright. "He runs the place now. We just work here." She took Cara's face in both flour-dusted hands, looked at her hard, found whatever she was looking for, and let go. "I kept your mornings. Like I said I would."

"I never doubted it," Cara said, and meant it.

Gabe's phone rang while Diane was putting the ovens on, and Cara saw David's name and watched the stubborn man go still the way he did around his brother.

He took the call by the window. She didn't hear all of it, but she heard enough, and she watched the rest. David had the story. Sophie's documentation of the connections between the Coastal Heritage Trust and members of the Neptune Brotherhood, as well as David’s own intel, held the kind of power that ended careers and made names. And he couldn't run a word of it, because naming Neptune now, before there was anyone left alive who could be protected from saying so, was a way of getting people killed in print. So he was doing the hardest thing a reporter could do. He was putting it in a drawer. Locking it down with the one supervisor of Barrett's they could trust, sealed for the day it could finally land without a body count.

"You did the right thing," Gabe said into the phone, low. A pause. "I know. I know it costs. It's still the right thing." Another pause, and then a sound that was almost a laugh, the brothers' shorthand, the first easy thing Cara had heard out of him in days.

When he hung up he stood at the window a while.

"He okay?" Cara asked.

"He will be." Gabe came back to her. "He said to tell you the world's not going to know what you did. Any of it. Ever." He said it like an apology.

"Good," Cara said, and surprised herself by how much she meant that too. "I've had enough of being known to last me."

Reagan called in the afternoon from a Louisiana recovery ward, sounding like a woman who had not slept since the last decade. Tom was awake. Tom was cracking jokes at the nurses, which the nurses did not appreciate, and Reagan plainly did. It would be a couple more days, at least, before he’d be cleared to fly, and he wanted everyone to know the light show rescue had been his idea and he expected full credit in the official record.