Elsie took a bite of her granola bar, chewed for a minute, seeming lost in thought, which made sense to Wyatt. While he knew the information packet had helped Elsie, it still must be odd to distill a person down into a few notes and bullet points here and there. Maybe she was mentally sorting through what she knew, finding which high points to hit for him.

“Noelle Mason. She’s from Anchorage. Pretty young, only twenty-three.”

“That is young. What does she do?”

“Works at a homeless resource center in Anchorage, actually.”

“Was she hiking alone?”

Elsie frowned. “No, with a friend. But the friend returned—Rebecca Reyes, according to the packet I got—and she left without Noelle, which seems odd. The friend reported her missing.” She finished the granola bar.

“You’d think the friend would have stayed on the island, maybe, and waited for Noelle? And how had they been separated in the first place?”

“Assuming they hired a water taxi to drop them off here like a lot of hikers do, it’s possible they got separated and Rebecca didn’t want to miss the water taxi... Still, it seems odd.”

“What are you thinking happened?” Wyatt asked.

She shook her head.

“I don’t know... It doesn’t make a lot of sense.” She shook her head, but the tension in her face and slight wrinkle in her forehead remained.

Wyatt reached for the trash, handed her a water bottle, which she took with a surprised look. “Thank you.” She took a long drink.

“She has no family. She was reported missing by the friend who had been hiking with her the day before...”

“At least no one is looking for her. Family-wise, I mean.”

The words were no sooner out of his mouth than Wyatt felt like a cold breeze had separated him and Elsie. She narrowed her eyes at him.

“What do you mean?”

“Just that if she doesn’t have a family, it’s good there’s not a whole family out there worried...” Yeah, he wasn’t making this better. It was a hollow reassurance, one of those ridiculous things people said to make other people feel better when something awful had happened. Even if she didn’t have a family missing her, it was terrible that she was missing. There were other people in her life whom her loss would impact. Coworkers. Maybe clients at the homeless shelter.

He’d messed up.

“Elsie, listen.”

She did not seem eager to listen.

He couldn’t blame her.

He hadn’t meant the words to sound callous. Of course he believed every life had value and that what Elsie was doing was worth it, though it was hard for him to see her risking her life for anyone. But he didn’t expect her to understand that and, well, he’d messed up. Badly.

Beside him, Willow lay on the ground, seeming to give him a look that conveyed her displeasure with him. Elsie was poring over the manila envelope, apparently not feeling like she’d had enough time to look at the profile before they’d jumped into searching.

He needed to apologize but didn’t know how to convince her that he meant it. He’d been good with words once upon a time, but it was like when he’d turned his life around God had taken away a bit of his ability to talk himself out of any trouble. Or into trouble. Which was good, but it definitely made moments like this harder, when he felt like he was fumbling for words.

“Elsie, I need you to hear me. I didn’t mean it the way it sounded.”

This time, she looked up at him, maybe hearing in his voice the fact that he was genuine. He waited for her to speak, holding his breath, realizing how much her friendship, if that was what you could call it, was starting to mean to him, even after such a short time.

“So you didn’t mean it wasn’t worth looking for her or anything like that?” Elsie didn’t like how doubtful she sounded, but at the same time, she wasn’t sure she liked her willingness to hear Wyatt out. The words had obviously been careless, and Wyatt had done nothing to make her think that some people had more value than others. But his words hit close to home.

Was she worth finding? After all, no one was looking for her. No one except someone who apparently wanted her dead. Of course Wyatt didn’t know that, couldn’t, since she’d kept that information from him.

Without thinking, she turned to him. “I told you I was in foster care.”

“Yeah.”

“Because they never could figure out who I belonged to. Who I was.” She swallowed hard. “The OCS caseworker liked the name Elsie. She was from Montgomery. Through a series of what I’m sure were annoying legal hoops, that became my name.” Elsie made herself not look away, kept his gaze. Saw his eyes...

Shine with tears?

“Elsie, I had no idea. I’m sorry that happened to you.” He blinked, and the shine was gone. Maybe she’d been imagining it. But his voice sounded sincere. “I had no idea. Wow, no wonder you want people found.”

She hated how easily he understood her.

Yes, she was still waiting to be found herself. Not by this would-be killer. But by someone. Had someone cared about her, ever? The holes in her past weren’t an absence; they were a presence all their own, haunting her life.

“Anyway.” Elsie cleared her throat, stacking up the papers she’d been looking at. “I’m almost ready to keep going. I think if Willow could find the scent again, we might make more progress today.”

“Why did she lose it, do you know?”

“Could be any number of things.” Elsie looked around. “The trees are a little thinner this high up, the vegetation, too. That makes the scent less likely to be trapped.” She frowned. “That’s my best guess. A shift in the wind? Scent is a fascinating thing.”

“I’m amazed you can do all this.”

She raised her eyebrows.

“Not that I’m surprised you specifically can do this, just that it’s a thing at all. It’s like you can read the dog’s mind and she can read the wind, the air itself. That’s pretty amazing, that’s all. Your dog’s amazing. You’re...” Wyatt trailed off.

The silence stretched between them and Elsie heard every noise. The wind in the spruce trees below them, the sound of Willow’s breathing, her own heartbeat pounding in her ears.

The thing that scared her most was that Wyatt didn’t sound like he was feeding her lines. He sounded awfully sincere. Surely she was intelligent enough that she could tell if someone was genuine.

But she didn’t trust herself right now, not with her old high school crush coming back to life. Even when he’d not been her type, when he’d been living life at way too fast a pace, she’d been intrigued by Wyatt. It had been so easy as a teenager to write that off to a stereotypical attraction to the bad boy, heightened by the fact that he was her friend’s very much off-limits brother.

But she wasn’t a high school kid anymore, and Wyatt wasn’t the man he’d been. And she liked who he seemed to be now. Not just a high school bad-boy stereotype, but a man who wanted to keep her safe even if it meant stepping into danger. A man who liked her dog. Someone who would follow instructions on a search without trying to pretend like he was the one in charge.

She...liked him. A lot. More than she had meant to?

That was almost as scary as anything that could be waiting for them in this wilderness. Even Elsie’s past.

“We should go. Start the search again,” she said quietly, but the words still felt so loud to her own ears as she broke the silence and whatever might have been between them.

Wyatt started to stand as soon as she said the words. “Sounds good.”

If only Elsie felt like anything was normal between them. She put Willow’s vest back on, told her to continue the search and then followed, aware of Wyatt’s presence close behind or even beside her. He was quiet. More so than he’d been on the way this morning, but maybe he was getting tired.