“Serves you right,” Free told me. She tossed my cell phone in my general direction. “How many times do I have to tell you that if you’re going to do something completely stupid and utterly inadvisable, I want in.”

“I saw Gabriel leaving the property. I followed him. And once I was following…”

“I’ve seen you in stalk mode,” Free said. “I know what it’s like, but I also know that at some point, you had a choice, just like you had a choice about keeping secrets.”

Right before I’d left, I’d told Jude what the sheriff had said about Gabriel. I could see how dumping the words kidnapping and assault on a person and then pulling a disappearing act might have been cause for some concern.

“The sheriff is Gabriel’s stepfather,” I told Free. It was easier to share a secret than to promise to stop keeping them.

Free processed the barbed edge in my voice. “On a scale of one to ten, how much do we hate the sheriff?”

In answer, I let my upper lip pull back from my teeth. Then I snapped them together. Saskia was on all four feet in an instant.

“That much.” Free let out a low whistle. NATO ambled into her lap, and she gave him a good scratch before pushing him off. Duchess farted again.

“You’ll have to excuse Her Ladyship,” Free said. “Being left high and dry at Extreme Hide-and-Seek gives her indigestion.”

Free wouldn’t hold a grudge, not if she so much as suspected I might need her. But she hated being left behind. She probably wouldn’t say another word about it, but if a dog wanted to continually fart in my general direction, she was all for it.

I was still weathering Duchess’s onslaught when Free’s phone rang. Free glanced down at the caller ID, then tossed it to me.

Cady.

This was not going to be pretty.

“Hello.” I answered calmly and heard Cady let out a breath the moment she recognized my voice.

“You want to explain to me why I have a message on my phone from Free, claiming you’d gone missing?”

Cady didn’t sound angry, but that dry, no-nonsense tone never boded well.

“Not particularly.”

I expected Cady to rephrase the question as an order, but instead, she hesitated. “Are the flashbacks getting worse?”

That question was a visceral reminder that there had been a time in my life when taking off—running, hiding, holing up—had been my MO.

“I just got caught up in doing something,” I said. Something seemed so much less likely to set Cady off than the words earthquake and rockslide and juvenile delinquent.

“Do me a favor,” Cady ordered. “Don’t get caught up again.”

I had control. She expected me to use it.