Luke was here. Lila hadn’t mentioned it, but it made sense that she wouldn’t have left him alone.
He went to the doorway and knocked once on the frame.
Luke sat on the edge of the narrow bed with his forearms on his knees and his head down, staring at the floor between his boots. He’d showered—his hair was still damp—but the bruise on his jaw had deepened overnight to a color that made the whole left side of his face look wrong. He didn’t look up when Bear came in.
Bear pulled the desk chair away from the wall and sat down. The room was small enough that their knees were almost touching.
He didn’t say anything. Luke would talk or he wouldn’t.
After a long while, Luke said, “You don’t have to do that.”
“Do what.”
“Sit here. I know she asked you to.”
“She didn;t even tell me you were here.”
He lifted his head, finally. His eyes were red-rimmed, wrecked. “You don’t have to babysit me.”
“I’m not babysitting you.” Bear leaned back in the chair. “I’m just sitting.”
Luke looked at him for a moment, then back at the floor. His jaw worked. “I remember the accident. I wasn’t that drunk.”
“The blood test says different.”
His mouth went flat. Then he nodded once, slow. “Yeah.”
That was all. Bear didn’t fill in the silence. They sat in the small room with the sound of Lila’s clinic going on around them—a phone ringing, the back door opening and closing, a dog somewhere raising a protest about its exam—and the silence between them held.
Lila found them twenty minutes later. She stood in the doorway for a beat, looked at Luke, looked at Bear, and then said, “The two o’clock moved to noon. I need you.”
He got up. Followed her out. In the narrow hallway, she stopped with her back to the wall and pressed both hands flat against it, a woman holding the building up or the building holding her up. Bear stopped beside her. He didn’t touch her, just stood close enough that she could feel him there.
“He’s not going to get better if I keep making it easier,” she said. “I know that.”
“Yeah.”
“I just can’t—” She stopped. Pressed her lips together and breathed through the rest of whatever the sentence was going to be. After a moment, her shoulders came down. “Okay. The retrievers are coming in. I need you on the big one. He hates strangers.”
The retrievers came and went. The afternoon moved forward on clinic time—exam after exam, a quick call out to a ranch on Route 9 with a colicking mare that turned out to be mild, a farm call that delayed them an hour. By the time Bear loaded the last of the supply order corrections into Lila’s truck for her, the light had gone flat and gray and the temperature had dropped back to something grudging.
He drove home with his hands loose on the wheel and his mind doing what it had been doing all day in the background—running calculations.
Why couldn’t he be attracted to Lila?
She was steady. She was good. She was someone he’d known for four years, someone he trusted without reservation, someone whose company didn’t cost him anything. Lila Garrison was kind and capable and beautiful in a quiet, uncomplicated way, and she thought well of him, which was not nothing.
And he didn’t want her.
He wanted the woman across the street who chased missing people into hostile territory. Who had a threat on her wall and a flask in her jacket and a smile that made him forget to be careful. Who had said the cruelest true thing anyone had said to him in fifteen years and meant it as a correction, not a wound.
You of all people should know what it costs when a man loses control and someone else ends up paying the price.
He turned onto Maple Street and saw Logan’s silhouette already moving behind the kitchen window. His stomach sank.
Fuck.
Jennifer Hayes had been very clear. He was supposed to be here when Logan got home.
