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Alan chuckles. “I appreciate that. Tell Sawyer I said hi. See you later, Katelyn.”

“Bye,” she says with a smile, then the two of us follow him out.

I have her wait just inside the hospital while I fight the storm to get to my truck.

Once I have it pulled up to the front of the hospital, and Katelyn is safely inside, she turns to me. “No way a seatbelt gave her those bruises on the side of her neck, Ryker. I know what it looks like when someone grips you hard enough to leave fingerprints, and that’s what those are.”

“I saw them, too.”

“Then what are we going to do? Someone could still be after her, and she wouldn’t even know.”

As I pull out into the raging storm and make the drive to Garrison and Katelyn’s house, it’s all I can do to keep my focus on the road ahead.

There is more to this story.

There has to be.

Because the feeling I get when I look at Dahlia Swanson is that I’m supposed to save her. But from whom?

“Here you go, Sweetie,” Maddie says as she refills my cup of coffee for the third time.

“Thank you.”

“You’re welcome.” But she doesn’t step away from the table. Instead, she cocks her head to the side. “How you doing, Ryker? You seem quiet, even by your standards.”

I smile at her. “Just tired. But I’m doing fine, thanks.”

She grins back at me. “Storm kept me up, too. I’m just glad it was downgraded before it hit. You let me know if you need anything.” With one final smile, she and her coffee pot head to the next table.

I lift the mug and take a sip, my mind still reeling over the woman I pulled from the river. Thankfully, the storm wasn’t as bad as they’d been predicting, so Alan seems confident he’ll be able to recover her car tomorrow, once they’ve finished cleaning up downed trees and restoring power to the parts of town that lost it.

Whether or not her belongings are still in the car is another story.

Will they offer us some insight as to why she was here in town? Or just leave more questions unanswered?

The image of her swims into my memory as I sit here in this booth alone. Doctor Edwards is brushing those bruises off like they’re part of the accident, but I know they’re not. Same thing with the bruising on her cheek.

I’d gotten a good look at it before I left the hospital last night, and there’s only one thing I’ve ever seen leave that pattern on someone’s cheek. A fist. Couple that with the drugs in her system—drugs she insisted she doesn’t mess with—and it paints a different story entirely.

But she disappeared after her patient died.

The pills were missing right after.

Is it possible that it really was all too much for her? Maybe she got into a fight after taking them and that led to the bruising?

I lift my mug and take another drink. Man, is she beautiful.

Hair so dark it’s nearly ebony makes those gorgeous mossy green eyes really stand out. Her delicate nose is dotted with freckles, her jaw sharp. The kind of jaw a man would like to trace with his fingers right before capturing those full lips with his.

Nope. I shove those thoughts so far down I nearly choke on them. The woman could very well be a drug addict. Been there. Done that. No interest in repeating.

“Hey, Tank.” Sawyer slides in across from me, ripping my thoughts away from where they shouldn’t be and planting me right back in the present.

“Find anything?”

A whiz with computers, Sawyer is the guy you need when you want to find information you probably shouldn’t have access to. He served with me when we were both SEALs and is one of four other men I’d consider close as brothers.

“Not a whole lot, but I’m still digging.” He sets a tablet on the table in front of us, unlocks the screen, then turns it so I can see the headline of a news report he’d pulled up.