Her wide-eyed look as he paused on the threshold wasn’t helping. She had a summer job at a grocery store out on the Bluewater Highway near Grand View, and she’d been scheduled to work at seven this morning.

“What happened? Did he come to the store again?” Though Sawyer understood that it was important, both socially and financially, for Clara to have a job, he hated that it was located outside his jurisdiction. The officers who patrolled Grand View knew about Charles Collins’s history—Sawyer had made sure of it—but still, the idea of someone else getting the call if anything happened didn’t sit easy with something in him.

“No, no!” She popped up, and the addition of a grin indicated that her eyes had been wide with something good, something other than fear. And, rationally, what were the odds? Charles hadn’t bothered them for a long time. It had been a year since he’d shown up at the store while Clara was working.

Sawyer needed to chill out.

About this, at least. The other source of this morning’s agitation? He did not foresee any chilling on that front anytime soon.

Clara dragged him to the dining table. “I swapped shifts with someone, because I got some great news yesterday that I wanted to tell you in person.” She made a silly jazz-hands gesture as he sat. “You are going to be so surprised!”

He’d had more than enough surprise for one day, but okay. “Hit me.”

“Do you remember that national essay contest I entered for Canada Day?”

Kind of? He hated to admit it, but one of the amazing things about Clara as she grew up was how self-regulating she was. He had the idea that other teenagers required more maintenance. That you had to nag them to do their homework and remind them about university application deadlines. But not Clara. She was so driven, so self-sufficient, that he was guilty of tuning out some of the details related to her many ambitions. Not the big ones. He knew she wanted to go to the University of Toronto and study engineering. But she was always applying for scholarships and entering contests, even though she had another year of high school yet to finish—it was hard to keep track of it all. “Of course,” he lied.

“So remember how the topic was, ‘If you could advise the prime minister on one major policy change, what would it be?’ I wrote this thing about vaccination policy. You remember that measles outbreak last year?”

He did remember that. He’d been the first responder on a 911 call for a kid who was having seizures because of what turned out to be measles-related encephalitis. Sawyer had decided they couldn’t wait for the ambulance, so he’d loaded the kid into the back of his cruiser and made the longest ten-minute drive of his life to get to the hospital.