Finding Tessa by Jaime Hendricks (best ereader for comics .TXT) 📗

the shore. Made some friends. Met some neighbors. It’s all good. A new beginning. One I never thought possible.” My voice lowers, out of the shame of my past. “For someone like me.”

Someone like me. What a loaded statement. According to the mold, I’m supposed to be on welfare and pregnant with my fourth kid, from a third baby daddy. Addicted to drugs, working at the checkout at the grocery store, and constantly trying to make ends meet.

Still, I want something just for myself, so I don’t tell her about Jace.

“Thanks for your help, Maribel. And as long as you’re free of him, you’ve won too.”

“I know. I guess this is goodbye?” Her voice cracks.

I feel like we’re in a movie, and this is the dramatic ending. But this is a happy ending. “It is. I wish you well. Maybe someday, our lives will cross paths again.”

“I’d like that,” she says. “Take care, Tessa.”

“You too.”

I hang up.

In the garage, I ruffle through some boxes—we’re not entirely unpacked yet. When I find Jace’s tools, I take out the hammer. And I obliterate the phone.

26

JACE

Jace drove straight from the morgue to the shore to clear his head. And to replay every damn second of the past four months—the good, the bad, and the ugly.

Except there wasn’t any bad, and definitely no ugly. Their life was good. He didn’t think he’d ever get to have anything that good ever again.

He parked the car in an empty lot. While the weather at this point in the season could either be eighty or fifty, the “beach season” was over, and the place was a ghost town even though it was pleasant today, with temps in the upper sixties. Opening the door, the smell of salt and seaweed hit his nostrils and instantly calmed him. With the thunderous crash of waves in the background, Jace removed his shoes and socks and left them in the car, then rolled up his pant legs to his midcalves. He balanced on the edges of his feet as he walked across the rocky parking lot and finally, his toes were in the cool sand.

Then he fell to his knees and pounded his fists on the beach in front of him, the same place he took Tessa to watch her first sunrise. With the thought of someone torturing her like that poor woman he just saw, it became too much to bear and his eyes opened to the ocean in front of him. He stood and took a step. Then another. Before he knew it, his feet were wet, and then the coolness spread to his upper thighs.

He walked into the ocean. His eyes closed, the water now chest high, soaking into his clothes. He kept his hands glued to the insides of his pockets. A wave crashed over his head, and for a few seconds, he held his breath—survival instinct. The wave retreated, but he stood his ground like a statue. Another wave. Every time the waves retreated, they buried his feet farther into the earth. The sand barreled him in above his ankles, and he couldn’t move.

Another wave was on the horizon, first a bubble of water, rising higher as it got closer, turning cylindrical. This was the one that would bury him.

And right when the wave was about to take him, he was dragged backward. Hands on each shoulder. His heels were now digging in the sand in the opposite direction. He was on his back, on the dry sand, where two burly men in plaid flannel shirts with the sleeves cut off stood above him. One slapped his face.

“You okay? Sir, say something!”

Jace coughed and turned to his left, blowing the water out of his nose.

“What were you doing out there?” the other man asked. “We were fishing over on the rocks and saw you going under. Didn’t even move your arms when the waves hit you. You okay?”

Jae sat up and placed his forearms over his bent knees. “Yeah. Thanks. I got confused.”

The two men exchanged a glance; the first man thrust a bottle of water into Jace’s hand and threw a towel over his shoulders. “You’re lucky we saw you. That could’ve gotten ugly real fast. This morning’s riptide is no joke.”

Jace unscrewed the top of the water bottle and finished it in two long swigs. He rubbed the top of his head with the towel and stood, handing it back to the man who gave it to him. “Thank you.”

“No, keep it man. The wife makes me bring the cheap ones fishing. I think she got it at the dollar store. We won’t miss it.”

“Thanks,” Jace said. “Thanks for everything.”

“You okay to get out of here?” towel man asked.

Jace, dripping with ocean, rolled the towel over his shoulders. “Yeah, I’m good. Parked right over there.” He motioned to his right with a quick head nod. “Really, thanks again.”

Back at the car, Jace was sopping wet and covered with sand. Luckily he always kept a spare set of running clothes in his trunk in case he decided to go on a spur-of-the-moment jog. He dried himself as best he could with the wet towel, then hooked it around his midsection as he disrobed in the parking lot, behind his open door. He didn’t have extra boxers, so he had to free-ball it in his comfy black pants with the white stripe down the side of the leg. He tugged a clean T-shirt over his head, one that he got in college with the name of his favorite bar on the front. He couldn’t part with it. It was a running joke between him and Tessa that he still hung on to it.

She handled it with kid gloves, knowing how much it meant to him.

He grabbed his phone; Evan had texted him that he was at his place, waiting in the kitchen. He knew their garage code and had waited for him at the house before. He’d heard through the grapevine that