“You miss it.” He meant to ask, but it came out as a statement. “Being there with them.”
His dad didn’t answer right away. The silence stretched long enough that he almost took it back, almost said never mind, forget it, the way he usually did when he accidentally said something that felt too close to real.
“Yeah,” Bear said finally. “Sometimes.”
Logan kept his eyes on Greta’s dark porch. “You didn’t have to move here.” He’d known that in a vague, background way for a while. “You could’ve— I don’t know. You could’ve sent me to boarding school and stayed at the ranch. Or just left me with the foster family in Denver.”
“Those weren’t options I was interested in.”
“Why not?”
Bear looked at him then. “Because I don’t abandon the people I love.”
Something warm bloomed in Logan’s chest. He looked down at his hands. “Maybe… I can try harder to like it here.”
Bear shifted in the chair again and let out a slow exhale through his nose.
Logan kept his eyes on his hands, on the leather bracelet his mom had given him for his last birthday, because looking at his dad’s face felt like too much right now.
“You might never like it here,” Bear said at last. “But that’s not the point.”
Logan looked up.
Bear was watching the street, his jaw set in that way it got when he was trying to say something that didn’t come easily. “Point is, I love you, and I will give up anything to make sure you’re safe. And I’m not going anywhere, no matter how much you push me away.”
Between them, King lifted his head. His ears swiveled forward, and he stared across the street at Greta’s dark house, at the empty driveway where the Jeep wasn’t.
Bear went still.
Logan held his breath and tracked where King was looking. Greta’s porch. The black windows. The side yard where the fence gate was just a darker shape against the dark.
Nothing moved.
King kept staring.
“Easy, boy,” Bear said, low. “They’re not home yet.” He reached down without looking and rested a hand on King’s head. King didn’t lean into it. He didn’t break his stare either.
A long minute passed.
King’s ears flicked once, then he huffed out a breath and dropped his chin back to the porch boards, eyes still open, still pointed across the street.
Bear didn’t move his hand. He didn’t look away from Greta’s house either.
Logan went back to spinning the bracelet around his wrist. “I think… I’m done pushing.”
“Yeah. Okay. Good.” Bear cleared his throat and abruptly pushed up out of the chair. “Pizza okay for dinner?”
“Yeah.”
Logan stood and stretched, stiff from the cold seeping into the porch boards. He pulled the front door open for his dad and turned to whistle for King.
King hadn’t moved. He was still on his belly between the chairs, chin down, eyes locked on Greta’s house.
“King. Come on, buddy.”
King’s ears flicked back toward him, but the rest of him stayed put.
“King.”
