Page 4 of Crosscurrent

She shut her eyes briefly against the mist from the pounding surf, then opened them again, gathering her wits.

Survival had rules. The first one was simple.

Keep moving.

1

Wade was trying to feed the cat sashimi again.

“Wade.” Cara Sweet’s new manager, Diane, didn’t even look up from the Sugar and Salt register. “No.”

The big man scowled. “It’s fresh albacore.”

Diane rolled her eyes. “He is a cat, not a longshoreman.”

Wade held the fishy paper bag in one hand and looked down at the cat with the expression of a man being unfairly denied the chance to share a meaningful culinary experience.

At his feet, Agent stared back without blinking.

Cara smiled down at the cinnamon-roll dough. Wednesday afternoons at the bakery had a rhythm she’d grown unexpectedly fond of over the last eleven months. The lunch rush was gone. The espresso machine had stopped shrieking. Rain threatened outside without fully committing, leaving the marina wrapped in a soft gray light that made the bakery windows glow warm against the street.

Even the dough under her hands seemed sleepy today.

Honestly, same.

Still, she had tomorrow morning’s cinnamon rolls proofing by two-thirty, which counted as victory. The bar was low these days.

Close to a year ago now she’d stepped off a Greyhound bus into Haven Cove carrying a fake driver’s license, and paperwork claiming she’d inherited a bakery from a woman she’d never met. All thanks to her NYPD handler, who sent her into hiding to avoid the federal warrant for her re-arrest.

Today she was arguing silently with pastry dough while Wade tried to feed premium tuna to a rescue cat named Agent.

The Lord worked in mysterious ways. Miraculous ones, honestly.

Diane handed Bruce Schwartz his change with the weary patience of a saint. Bruce had been discussing the city council’s drainage debate for nearly ten uninterrupted minutes now, and somehow Diane still looked only mildly homicidal.

“Appreciate you ladies keeping up with local politics,” Bruce said cheerfully.

“Mm-hm,” Diane replied.

Bruce finally left, still talking to himself.

Wade immediately slid the fish toward the cat again.

“Don’t you dare,” Diane warned.

“It’s protein,” he insisted.

But Diane didn’t back down. She was probably the only person involved in Sweet and Sawyer investigations who wasn’t the least bit intimidated by Wade’s size and un-specified military background. “It’s three in the afternoon.”

He watched the cat eat. “Time has no meaning to fishermen.”

Diane stuck her head into the pastry case to straighten the last of the croissants. “That explains so much.”

Cara laughed softly and reached for another section of dough. She liked this: the bakery, and the people. More than she probably ought to.

The strange little found-family operation that had somehow grown up around her life like ivy over old brick. For years she’d measured safety in exit routes and fake names and the weight of cash hidden inside go-bags. Even after Dom had smuggled her out of New York with enough money and paperwork to disappear into the Pacific Northwest, she’d spent months waiting for the floor beneath her new life to collapse.

Instead, somehow, she’d ended up here, in a tiny coastal town where the diner owner sent soup over when Diane caught a cold, and Wade fixed everybody’s engines whether they asked him to or not, and Tom’s teenage daughter treated the bakery like a second home.