“I don’t know how to do this,” she whispered. “I don’t know how to live in a world where she’s really gone.”
Naomi tightened her arm around Greta’s shoulders.
“You don’t have to know how yet,” Johanna said and reached for her hands. “You just have to get through tonight. That’s all. Just tonight.”
The tightness in Greta’s throat climbed up behind her eyes and stuck there. She pressed her face into the top of Atlas’s head and breathed him in — wet dog and dirt and the faint trace of the salmon treats she kept in the Jeep’s center console — and he didn’t move. He took the weight of her grief without flinching, and she thought, distantly, that she’d never loved a dog the way she loved this one.
Time stopped meaning anything after that.
Nessie brought her a mug of something warm — chamomile, maybe, with honey — and Greta held it in both hands without drinking. The heat seeped into her palms and that was enough. Maggie moved through the house in soft socks, pulling another quilt over the back of the couch, turning on a lamp in the corner so they wouldn’t be sitting in the dark when the candles burned down. Mariah stayed on the floor in front of her for a long time, then eventually got up and went to help Nessie in the kitchen.Johanna sat on the coffee table and didn’t try to fill the silence. She just stayed.
Naomi never moved from her side.
Greta drifted. She watched the candle flames bend in a draft she couldn’t feel. She watched Atlas’s ribs rise and fall. She watched the porch light through the window and the faint silhouettes of the men outside, shifting position now and then but never leaving. Once she thought she heard Walker’s voice low against the glass, asking something, and Johanna stood and went to the door and murmured back and returned. Once a truck door closed down the street. Once Atlas lifted his head and put it back down.
She didn’t cry again. She didn’t know if she had any more in her or if the tide had just gone out for a while.
The mug went cold in her hands.
Around nine-thirty, the rain started up again, soft against the windows. The room smelled like beeswax and eucalyptus and the faint honey-sweet thread of the alyssum on the coffee table, and somewhere under that, the savory smell of whatever Nessie had warmed on the stove for the men outside.
Greta sat in the middle of all of it and let it move around her.
She was hollowed out. Not empty exactly — still aching, still raw — but past the point where she could pretend anymore. Past the point where she could make the small adjustments that kept other people comfortable. Grief had stripped something out of her. Some social muscle that usually kept her polite. She could tell it wasn’t coming back tonight.
So when the door opened at ten, she lifted her head and looked.
Evander Cole stood in the doorway with his hat in his hands and Tilly sitting at his boot, his weathered face half in shadow. He’d talked himself into coming on the drive down. She could see him already wondering how to get back out.
Something in Greta’s chest hitched.
Cole didn’t do this. He didn’t come to town. He’d bought land in the backcountry after he left Valor Ridge and built a cabin and lived there alone except for the dog, and in the three years since, she’d seen him maybe a dozen times — always on contract work, always in the mountains, never here. Never in Solace. Never at her door.
He’d driven all the way in. For her.
The same way he’d ridden out for Naomi the summer she went missing, because Greta had called him at three in the morning and saidI need you, and he’d been at the gate of Valor Ridge by sunrise with Tilly in the truck bed and a rifle and no questions. He’d never asked her why he’d come. She’d never asked him to stay. That was the shape of it between them. He showed up when it mattered. That was the only language he had.
He was here. In her doorway. Hat in his hands.
“You okay?” His voice came out low and rough. Like he hadn’t used it in a while.
She nodded, and her throat closed up. “Yeah.”
He looked at her a long time. He tracked from her face to Atlas sprawled across her lap, to the women arranged around the room, to the flower pot in her lap and the quilt around her shoulders.
He turned the brim of his hat between his hands. “I’m sorry, Greta.”
The way he said her name almost broke her again.
“Thank you for coming,” she said. And she meant it. She meant it in a way she hadn’t meant any of thethank yousshe’d said tonight. “I know what it cost you to drive in.”
He worked his jaw. He didn’t answer that. Couldn’t, probably.
She should have left it there. She knew, even as she opened her mouth, that she should have left it there. Cole had said whathe came to say. He’d shown up. That was the gift. All she had to do was let him turn around and go back to his truck and the long dark drive home, and the strange, mostly-silent friendship she’d been building with him for years would stay intact.
But she was wrung out and hollow and past the point of managing anyone’s comfort, including her own.
“How are you doing?” she asked.
