Page 95 of Sniper's Pride

“It’s like I started a trend,” Everly had said during one of their lunches at Caradine’s, where the grumpiest restaurant owner in the world had allowed as how she, too, might not mind Mariah’s services, either—not that it made them friends or anything. “I think everyone’s wondering how many Alaska Force clients will decide they want to come live here.”

Mariah hadn’t told her that she doubted very much she was going to pack up and move here anytime soon, no matter how much she liked breathing in the fresh air here, where there was no Southern humidity and no McKennas to deal with.

She’d moved her few remaining things out of her apartment in Atlanta. Even with Walton under the watchful eye of the police—and better yet, now that he was out on bail, the pointed attention of the news media—she knew she could never feel safe there. More than that, she was done with Atlanta. The whole city felt tainted to her now. And there was a whole world out there, filled with cities her ex-husband—and David was legally her ex now, thanks to Georgia’s no-fault divorce option, which Mariah had been happy to run with because she wanted it over, so she could cut him that check he hadn’t been expecting—had no sway in whatsoever.

Maybe she’d start spending some of her money seeing each and every one of them.

When Everly had emailed her in need of a financial advisor, Mariah had jumped on it. It was an opportunity to create an actualcareer, when as far as she knew, there wasn’t a McKenna alive who’d ever had more than aseries of jobs. It was exactly the sort of thing David had always told her she was much too stupid to do—which was maybe why she’d never told him about her experiments with the stock market.

Becoming a kind of financial advisor for friends didn’t feel like work. It felt fun.

And Mariah was all about having fun these days. It had been good to spend a couple of months back home in Two Oaks. She’d reconnected with all her family members. There’d been some hard conversations, certainly, but in the end, they’d all ended up on the same page. And there had been a lot of laughter to go with it. She’d careened around the countryside in beat-up old pickups. She’d gone fishing in quiet rivers and had taken hikes through the woods. She’d danced in questionable bars, partaken of a small McKenna cure or two, and eaten her mama’s biscuits and gravy to make it through a few painful morning-afters.

But two months in—as much as she loved her family, and as much as she loved being able to appreciate her hometown and her people in a way she hadn’t growing up—the truth of the matter was that she still didn’t want to live there.

Everly’s email had seemed like a godsend. First, the idea that she could be any kind of financial advisor to anyone would never have occurred to her on her own. There was still too much David in her head.

But mostly, she wanted to go back to Alaska. She needed to go back to the place she’d been taken from. She needed to stay there, then leave under her own power. Mariah wasn’t sure how she knew this was what she needed, only that it was necessary.

Crucial, even.

She’d been back in Grizzly Harbor a week now, she was leaving on the morning ferry without any interference from horrible men who wanted to abduct her, and she liked it as much as she had before that awful man had forced her back to Georgia with him. She liked coffee with Caradine and self-defense classes with Blue. She liked laughter with new friends in the Fairweather or quiet evenings with her books. She liked the way summer took ever more of a hold, most evident in the light that wore on later and later into the night.

But she would have been lying if she’d tried to tell herself that it was the same as it had been before that man had appeared at her door with a wig and all those vile threats.

It wasn’t. Of course it wasn’t.

Because everywhere she went in this town, she saw Griffin.

At first she thought that maybe he was following her around again, and her heart had leaped at the notion—but he wasn’t.

Or if he was, he had no intention of revealing himself this time.

And either way, she was left with an emptiness that she knew was going to sit there forever. It was the precise shape and size of how much she missed him. And how much she wished she’d made a different choice that night out behind her mother’s old farmhouse.

But after everything that had happened, after her whole life up to this point, Mariah refused to allow herself to run after him. She refused to go back on the promise she’d made to the both of them that night.

She deserved more.

Even if she would never feel whole again, she deserved more.

And so did he.

It was better to feel less than whole alone than with him. Because if she knew anything, it was how quickly relationships that were unbalanced in that way ended up crushing the person who felt more.

She’d already lived it once. She wasn’t doing it again—and certainly not with Griffin, who made her feel so much more than David ever had that she might have laughed about it. If it didn’t hurt.

It was a cool night tonight. Much warmer than when she’d been in town before, and yet so much colder than Two Oaks. She shoved her hands in the pockets of her cargo pants, the ones she admitted only to herself that she’d bought because they reminded her of the kinds of things the Alaska Force men wore.

But that was one more thing she kept between her and her grieving heart.

She wandered up the street, nodding at the people who were also outside, soaking in the weather now that summer was almost here. This week was the Grizzly Harbor Music Festival. As far as Mariah could tell, it was an opportunity for every local person who’d ever built their own instruments or whiled away the winter singing songs to themselves to come on out, sit somewhere on the docks or outside the various shops along the boardwalks, and perform for their friends.

She skirted around a man playing a handmade ukulele who was engaged in a duet with a woman whose soprano singing voice sent chills down Mariah’s spine. Then she headed for her last night in Blue Bear Inn.She’d asked for her same room and had been surprised how easy it was to sleep in it, despite the memory of the man who’d shoved his way in through the door.

“If I’d seen him take you out of here, I’d have shot him myself,” Madeleine had told her when she’d checked back in, so stern and serious her red beehive shook as she spoke.

“I’d have appreciated that,” Mariah had said, and smiled so the other woman knew there was no blame there.

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