Except Annie ...
He wanted Annie—any way he could get her. As a friend. As a lover. He voted for a combination of both, if possible.
But the truth was, Annie was better off without him. Cole might not be broken, but he wasn’t whole either. And his status as a patient at Hope Hill, where she was a therapist, was freaking her out. For a tree hugger, she was certainly conventional.
He wished he could tell her the truth, start over.Hi, I’m Cole. Undercover investigator.Notyour patient.
He liked kissing her. And he wasn’t going to lie to himself; he was thinking about kissing her again. He was thinking, and definitely dreaming, about going past kissing.
He wanted to know what her long legs looked like out of her khaki cargo pants. He wanted to see her chestnut hair tumbling over her naked shoulders. He wanted to know what she’d look like tangled in the sheets on his bed.
She deserves better.
He needed to leave this place before he got any stupider.
Annie was in her bed, snug and safe—the only thing he needed to know about her, Cole decided as he walked down the hallway that night after the midnight feeding. He was proud that he’d kept his distance all day, even if, at times, he’d wanted to fall on her like a ravening beast.
He stopped in front of Trevor’s door.
The police tape was gone. Trev’s death had been officially ruled a suicide.
Cole opened the door to a bare room. Somebody had already cleaned up and mailed Trevor’s belongings to his parents.
What would happen to the body? His parents would want him home in Montana. If the coroner had released the body, Trev could be on his way home already.
He’s never going to build that barn.Cole looked around for the kid’s sketchbook, but that too had been taken. Good. His parents should have it.
Except ...
Yesterday morning, in the strange round clearing, the group had talked about how Trevor had been carried away by one hopeless impulse, one moment of darkness. He had not understood that the clouds would part again.
Cole accepted that sometimes suicide happened like that. It had with his father. But Trevor had taken a fatal dose of meds—a dose that would have taken weeks to collect, saving his pills. So the suicide couldn’t have been a decision born in a bad moment.
And even while Trevor had been collecting pills to kill himself, he was also preparing for the future, drawing a barn. He’d been excited about going home and building that barn for his mother. The two facts didn’t mesh.
Yet depressed people’s moods could fluctuate several times a day. Maybe in his light moments, Trevor had prepared for the future, and in his dark moments, he had prepared for death.
What the hell did Cole know? He wasn’t a therapist.
He turned to leave, then stopped when he stepped on something. He crouched to examine the small piece of black plastic he’d missed on the dark-gray carpet. He picked it up, put it on his palm, then looked at the floor again, more closely this time.
Two more pieces lay near the empty garbage can.Could have come from anything. A burner phone someone smashed up before getting rid of the evidence?The thought gave Cole pause.
He collected the pieces using only his fingernails and dropped them into his pocket before he left. He would put the chunks of plastic in an envelope and send them to his CO. If the man thought they were something, he could send them on to a lab.
Had Trev been the traitor?
Cole hated the thought. Yet he couldn’t discount the possibility. His mind churned as he tried to build a case around what few clues he had.
Trevor upset. Trevor asking questions. Trevor taking his own life. Black plastic.
Tuesday
As Cole lay in bed, he chewed over every detail, every minute he’d spent with Trevor. He didn’t get more than half an hour of rest toward dawn.
When he woke up, a text message waited on his phone, a note from Annie that she’d gone to the morning feeding early. Finnegan had called her. Joey was in jail. She was safe.
Cole grabbed his phone and texted her:What happened?