“Posted on the fridge. Green sticky note.”
Logan nodded.
Bear turned.
“Dad.”
He stopped. The word still landed differently every time. He turned back.
Logan was still in the doorway, arms crossed now, the bracelet at his wrist dark in the low light. His face was set, but there was something younger in it than usual — something that was trying to stay still but wasn’t all the way there.
“Is Greta going to be okay?”
Bear looked at his son. He thought about all the ways to answer that. He thought about bones in the mud on a mountain and a leather jacket that had been in the floodwater for god knew how long and a woman who had built her whole life around a person who might have been gone for fifteen years.
“I’m going to make sure of it,” he said.
Logan held his gaze. Then he nodded, once, and stepped back, and pulled the door mostly shut.
Bear went down the stairs two at a time.
The living room was empty. Atlas’s leash was gone from the hook by the door. She’d taken him. He felt the smallest release of tension at that — she hadn’t gone alone, even in her rush. He grabbed his keys from the hook beside where hers had been, shrugged into his jacket, and pushed out the front door.
The street was wet and black and still, the maple trees dripping softly onto the pavement. Her Jeep was gone, the space across the street empty, the dark green front of her bungalow sitting quiet. The corner streetlight threw its pale cone down over the intersection and lit the standing water in the low point of the road like a mirror.
He got in the truck.
The engine turned over and the headlights swept the front of his house, the porch with the two cedar chairs side by side, the empty street. He put it in reverse and backed out, turned the wheel, and drove.
He knew the road to Cole’s land. He’d been on it twice since the flood started. He knew approximately how long it would take Greta to get there, and he knew she drove like a person who had been moving through backcountry terrain since she was old enough to hold a wheel, and he would not catch her before she arrived.
He wasn’t trying to stop her from seeing it.
He just needed to be there when she did.
The Bitterroots were invisible in the dark, but he could feel them — the way you always could out here, the mass of them pressing against the sky even when the sky was black and starless. The road ahead of him was slick and empty and the headlights barely reached.
He drove.
The road narrowed to dirt as soon as she turned off the highway, the Jeep’s headlights carving twin paths through the mud and darkness. Greta gripped the wheel with both hands, pushing the vehicle faster than she should have in these conditions. Her breath came in short, shallow pulls that burned the back of her throat. Fifteen years. Fifteen years of searching, of flyers and tip lines and hollow promises, and now a call in the middle of the night—bones in the mud, a jacket with a patch she’d know anywhere. She took the final turn at a speed that nearly rolled the Jeep, the tires sliding across the rain-slick surface before catching, and then she saw it—the cluster of headlights and flashlights down by the creek, the dark silhouettes standing in a ring.
She slammed the brakes. The Jeep skidded to a stop behind Walker’s truck, the engine still running as she threw herself out of the driver’s seat. Atlas leaped out behind her, hackles raised, ears forward, reading the tension in her body before she’d taken three steps.
The ground was sodden, sucking at her boots with each step. Ahead, flashlights swung in wide arcs, illuminating the water’s edge where the flood had scoured a fresh, raw cut into the bank. Greta counted six vehicles—Walker’s truck, Ghost’s blackSUV, the beat-up Tacoma Jonah drove, another truck she didn’t recognize, and two Bravlin County Sheriff’s vehicles parked at odd angles, their emergency lights dark. At the edge of the clearing, Boone leaned against his own truck with a cup of coffee in his hand and a rifle at his feet, his posture alert even in repose. He straightened when he spotted her, one hand already lifting to wave her back.
“Greta.” Walker appeared from between two trucks, his face grim in the harsh light of the flood lamps. “You shouldn’t be here right now.”
She kept walking. “Where is she?”
“Sheriff’s deputies are processing the scene.” He moved to intercept her, his tall frame blocking her view of the creek. “You need to go home.”
“No.” The word came out harder than she’d intended. “Where’s Evander? He found her?”
“Cole’s down by the water with Jonah. He found the remains when he was checking on flood damage after the water receded.” Walker’s voice had the careful, measured quality he used when talking about hard things. It was the voice of a man about to deliver news that would change everything.
It was fifteen years too late.
She pushed past him. The creek had changed course in the flood, carving a new channel thirty feet from its original bank. What had been meadow was now a churned mess of mud, broken branches, and debris. At the water’s edge, three deputies worked in the harsh glow of portable lamps. One knelt in the mud, camera in hand. Another stood with a clipboard, making notes. The third bent over something half-buried in the mud.
