Operation Reunion. Justine Davis

proved it. And Dane was not a subject she wanted to discuss just now.

      “So, you’ll be leaving again now?” she asked hurriedly. “Nothing really holding you, if you want to leave, I mean, with both your folks gone.”

      Well, that was tactful, she thought. Teach her to dodge without thinking.

      “And my best friend,” Troy said. “Don’t forget that.”

      Kayla blinked. As if she could forget. But until it had come together like this, she hadn’t quite realized just how many losses Troy had suffered. As many, in fact, as she had, albeit not in such an ugly way.

      “You know, I still don’t believe it,” he said. “I know what the police think, and he ran and all, but I still can’t believe Chad really did it.”

      The words, from someone who knew Chad almost as well as she did, were balm to her battered spirit.

      “Thank you,” she said fervently.

      He studied her for a moment. Then, gently, he asked, “You still don’t believe it either, do you?”

      “No. No, I don’t. Chad couldn’t. Wouldn’t.”

      “I agree.” He sighed. “I’d have been trying to prove it myself, if it hadn’t been for my dad, then my mom getting sick.”

      “I know you would,” she said.

      “Are you still looking for him?”

      She nodded. “And I have some help this time. Some people from the Foxworth Foundation.”

      He blinked. “Who are they?”

      “They specialize in helping people when no one else will. Especially with what they call lost causes.”

      “Never heard of them. Are you sure they’re legit? I wouldn’t want you getting taken.”

      You and Dane, she thought. “Thanks for worrying,” she said.

      Troy reached out and touched her shoulder comfortingly. “If there’s anything I can do,” he said.

      “They may want to talk to you, since you were Chad’s best friend.”

      “Send them around. I’ll be happy to talk to them.”

      “Thank you, Troy.”

      She felt much better now, she thought when Troy had gotten into his car and gone. He had that knack. And knowing she wasn’t the only believer in Chad’s innocence helped.

      If only Dane felt the same way.

      “You really don’t know where your brother is?”

      Kayla looked at the woman across the table from her. Hayley shook her head. “No. But Walker is just a born wanderer, I’m afraid. I know he loves me, and I love him, but he just has this need to see what’s over the next mountain. And eventually, he always calls.” She smiled then. “But now it feels like I have a ton of siblings. Everybody at Foxworth seems to think I need looking out for.”

      Kayla couldn’t help smiling at her tone of mock grievance. “Is that good or bad?”

      “Mostly good.”

      “You don’t seem like you’d need a lot of protecting.”

      “I don’t,” Hayley said. “But they love Quinn, and he loves me, therefore…”

      She ended the simple yet moving statement with a wave of her hand.

      “Nice,” Kayla said, trying to quash the now familiar ache that was always threatening to crush her, making it hard to breathe.

      “Very. And unexpected.”

      Hayley’s cell phone chirped the arrival of a text message. She excused herself to glance at it. Kayla guessed, from the way her mouth curved into a soft smile, that it was from Quinn.

      Kayla glanced around, looking for distraction from the pain that was so close to the surface. She’d been surprised when Hayley had directed her so far out; in fact, she had begun to feel a little leery the farther they’d gone. She supposed that was why it was Hayley, because if she’d been riding with Quinn, she would have been a lot more nervous; for all his offering to help he was still a stranger.

      At just the time she really began wondering if she’d made an awful mistake, they’d arrived here. They’d left the city limits of Redwood Cove and entered a more rural county area. The three-story green building was somewhat isolated in a clearing hidden by a thick stand of tall evergreens. The color blended with the trees, making it even harder to spot. There were no markings, not even a street number or name.

      “Sometimes we make people unhappy with us,” Hayley had explained. “So the less obvious we are, the better.”

      Off to one side was what looked to be a large warehouse, and on the far side of that, a flat concrete pad with markings painted on it, and an orange wind sock that had been barely stirring in the minimal breeze. A landing site for a helicopter.

      “I would have thought you’d have an office in Seattle,” she had said.

      “Quinn picked this one, and he’s not a city boy at heart,” Hayley had answered.

      No trace of the city here, Kayla thought now as she sat at the large table. The windows here in the top-floor meeting room were large, giving a full view of the rest of the clearing, the trees that ringed it and the sky above. Which was blue today, a clear early-summer day that made the long gray days of winter seem worth it.

      Something moved in one of the trees, a large maple amid the firs. Kayla leaned forward, curious, and her breath caught when she realized it was a bald eagle. No, two of them, she thought, a pair, looking as if they were snuggling together on the sturdy branch.

      “And that,” Hayley said, “is one of the reasons Quinn set up on the third floor even though we’re only using half of the first and the second not at all. They come here often.”

      That bit of information reassured her in a way nothing else could have; the idea of a man like Quinn choosing to situate his office up two flights of stairs just to watch birds—albeit glorious, magnificent birds—was somehow very comforting.

      “Tell me about Dane.”

      Kayla stopped breathing altogether for a moment as the pain she’d quelled for a moment rushed back. Was she that easy to read? Or was Hayley just that perceptive? Probably both, she thought.

      “He’s obviously crazy about you,” Hayley said.

      “He was.” Even Kayla could hear the ineffable sadness in her voice. Just the sound of it made her sadder still.

      “And you?”

      “I’ve loved him in one way or another since I was fourteen.”

      Hayley simply waited. Kayla sighed.

      “That’s when we moved here. I met Dane the next day. I climbed the tree between our houses and couldn’t get down.”

      “So he is literally the boy next door?”

      “He was then, yes. And he was…wonderful.”

      She hesitated. She didn’t want to say anything that made them think badly of Chad, not when she was asking them to believe her and help prove him innocent, but she also couldn’t not give Dane his due. He might have given up on her, on them, but she couldn’t deny he’d stuck with her longer than anyone else would have, that he’d been there for her every step of the way until even his considerable patience ran out.

      “He was like a brother at first,” she said. “Only nicer.” The subtext “compared to Chad” was there, and she guessed Hayley knew it, but she couldn’t bring herself to say it aloud. Besides, didn’t all siblings abuse each other in that familial sort of way? “Dane laughed with me, not at me, for being a skinny, bookish girl with braces. He knew how it felt to be the