Logan let out a sound of pure betrayal from somewhere near the fence line—“Oh,come on—” which set off another round of laughter from the crowd.
Bear’s arms tightened around her for one moment, then he shifted his grip and she was off the ground entirely, scooped up like she weighed nothing. One arm under her knees, one at her back, her feet dangling somewhere below his elbow. She grabbed his shoulder on reflex.
“Put me down, Sasquatch!”
“Absolutely not, Tinkerbell.”
Another cheer went up from the fence line.
She looked out over his shoulder at all of it— at the string lights warm and gold across the tables, at the whole loud, lit-up improbable family they’d all stumbled into.
And for the first time in fifteen years, she realized she was not looking backward.
epilogue
Forty-one minutes.
Evander checked his watch again. Not because he’d lost track, but because looking at his wrist gave him somewhere to put his eyes that wasn’t the room.
The Dead Marshall smelled like every roadhouse he’d ever been in — spilled beer and old wood and the ghost of a thousand cigarettes smoked before Montana put that to rest. The ceiling was low, the beams exposed and dark with age, the walls covered in decades of signage that nobody had thought to take down and nobody had thought to add to recently. A neon beer sign threw bruised-purple light across the far corner. The jukebox in the corner was grinding out something twangy about a woman who left and a man who should’ve known better. Evander had been listening to it repeat the same three songs for forty minutes.
Under his barstool, Tilly lay with her chin on her paws, her dark eyes moving across the room in slow, regular sweeps. Tracking the exits. Tracking the strangers. Not growling, not tense—just watching, the way she always watched, the way they both always watched, because watching was the habit that kept you alive long enough to develop other habits.
The bartender had had feelings about his dog, which he had made clear with a single long look when Evander walked in with Tilly at his heel. Evander had held his stare until the man looked away first, and that had settled it. Nobody had said anything since. His dog went where he went. Period.
He picked up his beer. Didn’t drink it. Set it back down.
The beer was the price of admission. Sitting at a bar without a drink was conspicuous, and conspicuous was the one thing he’d spent eight years refusing to be. So he’d ordered it, and he’d nursed it, and now it was warm, and he’d had maybe three sips, and the bartender had stopped looking at him. Which was the point.
You’re lonely, Evander. You’ve been lonely for a long time.
He scowled at the bar top.
He wasn’t fucking lonely. He chose solitude. There was a difference, and Greta Dougherty was wrong about this particular thing.
Which was how he’d ended up here, in a roadhouse forty miles from nowhere, proving something to a woman who couldn’t even see him.
He’d give it twenty more minutes so he could tell Greta, the next time he saw her, that he had a social life.
A woman at the far end of the bar glanced his way for the second time. Mid-thirties, black jeans, a denim jacket with something embroidered on the sleeve he couldn’t read from this distance.
He ignored her.
He and Tilly lived well. The cabin was warm. The work was straightforward— track, trap, repeat. Repair what needed repaired. Sleep when he needed to sleep. Eat when he needed to eat. He didn’t require the noise and friction of other people’s lives pressed up against his own. He’d had that once, in a different life, and it had led to classified files and dead civiliansand six years of federal lockup, so he had ample evidence that proximity to other people was, on balance, a net negative.
He was not lonely.
He checked his watch. Nineteen minutes.
Tilly’s ear rotated.
Not toward the woman at the end of the bar. Not toward the two men who’d been playing pool since before he arrived, their game slow and conversational. Toward the front door — that particular forward angle she used when she was tracking something approaching from outside, something still thirty or forty feet out. She’d had that quality since before she was his. His spotter had always said Tilly heard things three seconds before they happened.
His spotter had been right about most things.
Evander set his beer down and watched the door without appearing to watch it. The jukebox ground through the end of its current song and the needle caught, skipped, and dropped into silence before the next track loaded. For three seconds, the roadhouse was quiet enough that he could hear the wind outside working at the eaves.
Then the new song started — something slower, sadder — and Tilly’s ear held its angle, and the front door stayed closed for another half-minute while he sat with his hands loose on the bar and his back to the wall and his eyes on the neon Coors sign and thought about nothing in particular, which was what he was best at, which was what Greta apparently considered evidence of a problem.
