“You think that’s what she’s doing?” Harrison asked. He took a cup of coffee from her mom with a slight nod of thanks. It was a strange thing to see, her mother accepting a large, strange man in her precious daughter’s kitchen at four o’clock in the morning, but Alice had always been good in a crisis.

“I do. We’ve probably been working her too hard, so she saw a chance at freedom and took it. She’s still just a baby in so many ways.”

It was the wrong thing to say. Mentioning how vulnerable Bubbles was only served to make Harrison vulnerable too.

“Hey.” She reached out and placed a hand on his arm, feeling the tense strength of him through the worn flannel. “She’ll be okay. Dogs run away from their owners and come home none the worse for their little adventures all the time. I promise.”

“Maybe it works that way for most people,” he said soberly. “But whenever anyone runs away from me, it has a tendency to stick.”

She dug her fingers so firmly into his arm it caused him to wince. “We’ll find her and bring her home where she belongs, Harrison. I promise.”

He nodded once, accepting her vow as though she carried the authority of the world on her shoulders. Her mother watched the interaction with unblinking eyes peeping over the top of her coffee cup. Sophie knew she was paying attention because even though the mug was held to her lips, she hadn’t taken a sip even once.

Sophie also knew that somewhere along the lines, her mom had begun to see what she saw—that Harrison wasn’t some cold stranger bent on ruining her precious daughter’s life. He was just a man. One who was scared and lonely and who had been that way for so long it had never occurred to him that he deserved more.

But he did deserve it, and for the first time since Sophie had entered his life, he was ready to push himself to get it.

“Harrison says he wants to start a—what was it?” She looked a question at him. “Grid search?”

He nodded, his firefighting training clicking into place. “Yes. It’s standard whenever anyone goes missing in the wilderness. By putting up parameters and assigning everyone a region, we can cover the most ground without doubling up. Even if she moved as fast as her legs would take her, she can’t have gone too far from the house.”

“Okay, then that’s what we’ll do.” Sophie released her grip on Harrison and grabbed the pen and notepad Lila kept in a tidy pile next to the house phone. “You set up your parameters, and we’ll recruit everyone we know to take them.”

Her mom nodded. “I’ll wake the girls and then give Paulette a call. She’ll want to help.”

“Paulette?” Harrison echoed.