“If Bear’s okay with it.”
A thrill shot through him, and he spun back to the computer. He stopped on a clip he hadn’t seen before— Bear standing at the edge of the corral, one forearm braced on the top rail, watching X work the horses. He wasn’t looking at the camera. He didn’t know it was on him. He was just standing there in his usual T-shirt and jeans with a quiet smile.
He watched it for a second longer than he meant to.
“Your dad is a goodhombre, Logan,” X said softly. “One of the best I’ve ever known. But good people are not exempt from making bad mistakes. So maybe cut him some slack, huh? Nobody’s perfect.”
Logan thought about Bear in the kitchen every morning before school, getting the eggs wrong, and the muffins he’d started leaving on the nightstand every night. Thought about him sitting in the desk chair the size of a child’s toy, knees up around his ears, saying,“I wanted you every day.”
Good people can make bad mistakes.
“Okay, enough sappy talk. You get to work.” X pulled his phone from the dock on his desk. “It’s time I educate you on Selena.”
Later, when X dropped him and King off in front of the house on Maple, Logan found his dad on the front porch in one of the Adirondack chairs.
Bear was just sitting there in the fading afternoon light, not doing anything—no phone, no book, no project in his hands. Just sitting, one boot crossed over his knee, looking out at the street, toward Greta’s dark house.
King ambled over, happy and tired, and dropped by his feet with a big sigh.
“Hey,” Bear said. “How was it?”
King rolled onto his side between the chairs and started snoring almost immediately.
“It was… good.” Logan dropped into the other chair. The wood was cold through his jeans. He pulled his hoodie tighter and looked out at the street, the same direction Bear had been looking — at Greta’s house, dark and quiet, the Jeep gone from the driveway. “Where’s Greta?”
“Apparently out of town for a few days with Naomi.” He sounded grumpy about that, just like Ghost. “She’ll be back on Wednesday.”
“Ghost was moping this morning.” He looked at Greta’s porch and thought about her sitting on the log beside him in the dark, telling him about Alice and Naomi’s lead.
She’d told him. Not Bear. Him.
He didn’t say anything else about Greta, and Bear didn’t either. They just sat there in the two chairs with King snoring between them, and the town went quiet as evening fell.
He had been in Montana for a month, and he could count on one hand the times he and Bear had just sat together without either of them bracing for something. This felt different from those. This felt like they’d both decided, without saying so, to not brace for anything.
“I helped X with video editing,” he said finally. “For the ranch’s social media.” He paused. “Did you know he does it to bring in donations? For the program. He’s not just like chasing clout.”
“Yeah,” Bear said. “The ranch was struggling until he came along and started bringing in money with his videos.”
“He… said maybe I could help him this summer. Like as a kind of internship.”
Bear shifted in his chair, the wood creaking under his weight, and looked at Logan with an expression that was hard to read in the fading light. “Is that something you’re interested in?”
“Yeah, maybe. I mean, I like editing videos. And he’s really good at it. At the videos and the riding.” Logan watched a pickup roll past on Maple. “But he told me he couldn’t ride when he got here.”
“He couldn’t.” Bear was quiet for a moment. “Walker put him on a horse his first day at the ranch. Said if he could learn to trust a fifteen-hundred-pound animal, he could learn to trust peopleagain.” He rubbed the back of his neck. “X thought it was the dumbest thing he’d ever heard.”
“Did it work?”
Bear glanced at him. “You’ve seen him ride. Like he’s been in the saddle his whole life.”
Logan looked down at King, who was twitching in his sleep, legs pedaling, chasing something. He thought about the kitchen that ranch— Johanna’s laugh, Walker’s eggs, Hatch’s tired mug-lift greeting, Ghost moping at the coffee pot with his smashed-and-glued mug, River with his cereal and bunny slippers, and the way Jax carried Oliver through the back door, like it was a completely normal way to show up somewhere.
Bear had been part of all of that.
And then he’d left.
Not because he had to. Because Logan needed somewhere to live.
