“Bones,” he said, low and careful. “Cole found them on his land when the creek receded. He’s sure they’re human.” He paused. Let her have the first part before the rest of it. Her breathing had gone shallow and even, her eyes steady on his face. “There was a jacket,” he said. “Leather. MCR patch on the left shoulder.”
She looked at him.
The silence lasted four seconds. He counted them.
Then she was off the bed.
She moved fast — not panicked, not stumbling, just absolutely committed to movement the way she always was, as if the only thing she knew how to do with an unbearable thing was aim her body at it. She got her boots from the nightstand floor, sat on the edge of the bed, and started lacing them.
“Greta.” He straightened. “Wait.”
She didn’t answer. The first boot was on. She grabbed the second.
“Let me drive. We’ll go together.” He reached for his shirt, already scanning the room for his boots, his vest, his keys. “Just give me two minutes?—”
“I know the way to Cole’s land.” She stood, and her voice was flat and steady, the voice she used when she was containing something too large to let out right now. The voice she’d used at the flood staging area. The voice that said she was operational and everything else was filed. She grabbed the fleece off the post at the foot of the bed. She didn’t look at him. “I know every road between here and the Bitterroot backcountry. I’ve been on them for fifteen years.”
He got in front of her.
She looked up at him. Her face was pale, the freckles standing out against the white of her skin, and her eyes werethe pale, stark green he’d seen in her once before — at three in the morning when she’d told him she was tired. She was holding all of it together with both hands and he could see the effort in the set of her jaw, in the way she was breathing, and it was the bravest and most terrible thing he’d ever watched.
He stepped aside.
She was through the door before he’d gotten his shirt on.
He heard her take the stairs at a run — controlled, both feet, not reckless, even now — and then the front door, the latch catching, and then quiet.
He pulled his shirt over his head and sat on the edge of the bed to get his boots on, lacing them fast. His hands were steady. Everything in his body had gone to the particular cold focus he’d learned in uniform and kept ever since: don’t fall apart now, fall apart later, there is a job to do.
He went down the hall and knocked on Logan’s door.
A beat. A shift of weight, the creak of the bed. Then the door opened.
Logan was in the oversized Valor Ridge hoodie he’d been sleeping in, hair pressed sideways, eyes catching the hallway light. He took one look at Bear’s face and the last of the sleep dropped out of him. He went very still in the way Bear recognized — Bear had watched him learn to go still over the last six weeks, in the specific situations where Bear himself would have gone rigid and quiet. The kid was doing it now, shoulders squared under the hoodie, feet set, reading the situation.
“What’s wrong?”
“I need you to stay here with the dogs.” Bear kept his voice low, even. “Both of them. Don’t let King follow me to the truck.”
Logan’s eyes moved past him to the empty hallway, back to Bear. “Where’s Greta?”
“She already left. I need to go after her.”
“Why?” He wasn’t being difficult. The question was the same as all his questions lately — direct, assessing, the kind of question that wanted an actual answer.
“I’ll explain later. Right now I just need to know—” He paused. He looked at his son standing in the doorway in the middle of the night, fifteen years old and already good at going still in hard moments. “Can I trust you?”
Logan looked at him.
Not the look he’d worn the first three weeks — the look that said he was waiting for Bear to give him a reason to leave or lie. This was different. This was the look he’d started wearing around week four, after the sandbags, after the flood, after he’d watched Bear come back soaked and shaking from the flood ditch and hadn’t said a word about it except to put a plate of Johanna’s leftover chili in front of him when they got back to the ranch.
“Yeah,” Logan said. “You can trust me.”
Something in Bear’s chest went tight and loose at once.
“Good.” He squeezed his son’s shoulder once, brief and certain. “Lock up behind me. Don’t let the dogs out without leashes. If anything feels wrong, call Boone.”
“What’s his number?”
