He tucked her tighter against his chest, and she let herself be held. It was new, her letting him do that. He didn’t want to ask what it cost her to do it now. Maybe it had taken getting choked in a gun shop and nearly losing her hand in a rescue, maybe it had taken two years of being too stubborn to ask anyone for help, but he wasn’t about to ruin it by saying any of that out loud.
Instead, he pressed his mouth to the top of her head and kept his hands moving on her back until her breathing settled.
“Bear. You know Daniel isn’t going to let this go.”
Yeah, he was well fucking aware of that fact. As soon as Daniel got out of the hospital, Hank would bail him out of jail, and he’d be free to continue terrorizing Greta.
She must have felt his body go tense, because she pulled back enough to look at him, her face softer than he’d ever seen it.
She put her hand on his cheek. “You can’t fix it, Dane. I don’t want you to try. Leave it to the police. I told Trooper Halvorsen everything when he came to the firehouse this morning. So promise me you won’t go all vigilante on Daniel.”
“I want to pummel him into a concrete stain.”
“Sasquatch.” She paused. “You have Logan to think about.”
He hated that she had a point.
“I want to,” he grumbled, “but I won’t.”
She settled back down onto his chest, but still didn’t relax, and he didn’t know how else to help. So he just held her and settled in to wait out the rest of the night with her while she worked through whatever had her muscles in knots.
“Bear,” she whispered finally, voice choked. “I think my sister’s dead. I thought it when we went to Glenhaven, and when I went to Spokane, but I don’t know how to stop looking. I’ve been doing it for fifteen years. I built Summit around it, I built my whole life around it, I don’t— I don’t know who I am if I’m not looking for her.” A pause, and then, she added so softly that he had to strain to hear her, “I’m so tired.”
He held her tighter. He didn’t tell her Alice might still be out there, didn’t tell her not to give up, didn’t offer her any of the things people said when they didn’t know what else to do with someone else’s grief. He just held her, and let her be tired, and let it be true.
She lay still for a while. Long enough that he thought she might be sliding back toward sleep.
But then she spoke again. “What are you thinking?”
He turned the question over. He had a lot of thoughts. Most of them were about her. “I’m thinking I don’t want you to stop being who you are,” he said. “And who you are includes the looking.”
She lifted her head and looked at him with eyes that were too bright, swimming with tears. He cupped her cheek and swiped his thumb over her cheekbone, not surprised to find the skin there dry. She’d swallow down her grief and blink back those tears before she’d ever let them fall.
Then the rain stopped.
All at once, the drumming on the roof cut out, leaving just the unsteady drip of water from the eaves.
Bear tipped his chin down to rest on the top of her head.
Greta closed her eyes.
And the house was still.
Until the phone rang.
twenty-five
It was Ghost’s ringtone — two short pulses, nothing else — and Bear was sitting up before the second one, already reaching for it on the nightstand, his thumb finding the screen by feel in the dark.
Greta was finally asleep against his shoulder.
He got up carefully and moved to the doorway before he answered, pulling it mostly shut behind him. “Yeah.”
“Floodwaters are receding on Cole’s land.” Ghost’s voice was flat. No introduction, no preamble. Typical Ghost. “He found something.”
Oh, fuck. This wasn’t going to be good. He braced himself against the doorframe and asked, “What kind of something?”
“Bones. Partial remains. Cole found them this morning when he went out to check the creek line. The water must have uncovered them.”
