Greta nodded. Couldn’t manage anything else.
Bear shut the door behind Naomi and crossed the room without a word. He bent down, slid an arm under her knees, another behind her back, and lifted her off the floor like she weighed nothing. He carried her to the couch and sat with her in his lap, turning her so her face tucked against his chest.
She went without resistance. She didn’t have the energy to resist, and she didn’t want to. She pressed her face into the hollow of his throat and breathed him in. His heartbeat was steady under her cheek, slow and even, and she focused on it—counted the beats, breathed with the rise and fall of his chest, let it anchor her when everything else felt like it was spinning out.
He didn’t say anything. Neither did she. There was nothing to say.
Alice was dead.
She’d been gone for fifteen years, and Greta had spent those years building a life around not knowing, around the hope that maybe, somehow, her twin was still out there.
She’d been holding herself together all night. Holding herself upright, holding herself steady, holding herself in place so the women could come and sit with her and say the things people said.
But she didn’t have to hold herself together anymore.
Bear was doing that for her.
twenty-seven
Greta stared at the casket and tried to make her mind accept the size of it.
Small.
Too small.
Not a coffin for a person.
A box for what the searchers had been able to bring out of the mud. Oak grain. Dark stain. Brass handles polished bright under the gray morning.
She stared at it and the open grave beneath it, and couldn’t wrap her mind around the wrongness of laying Alice to rest in pieces.
The officiant’s voice carried across the flat wind-scoured plot at the edge of town, where Solace’s dead had been going to rest since 1880.
The rain had softened the ground. Greta’s black flats sank a little every time she shifted her weight. She’d bought them three years ago for a wedding she never attended. Now mud worked its way around the soles while her sister’s casket waited above a hole in the earth.
The Valor Ridge family had arranged themselves in a loose semicircle around the grave. Walker stood with his hat in bothhands, his shoulders square, Johanna beside him with a hand resting on his back, Logan beside her. Jonah held his own hat against his chest. Nessie was pressed into Jax’s side, pale-faced, and Jax had one arm around her and the other around Oliver. Naomi stood with her jaw set and her eyes red-rimmed, her coat buttoned all the way to her throat. Ghost hovered beside her, as usual.
Maggie and Anson stood close behind them. Lila was pale and hollowed out beside Boone. River was in an actual button-down shirt that looked like it had been ironed, and his hair was combed and gelled back instead of the usual riot of curls. X stood beside Mariah, sneaking worried looks at her while she ignored him.
The town had also shown up in force. Cody and Jodi Simms stood shoulder to shoulder, both in dark Carhartts, Jodi’s hand tucked into the crook of Cody’s elbow. Margery Pendry had brought her good cane, the one with the silver handle, and she leaned on it without looking like she needed it. Ruthie Campbell stood beside her, eyes already wet, dabbing at them with a frilly handkerchief.
And Dallie-Ann.
Greta hadn’t expected her. The hairstylist hovered at Ruthie’s elbow in a black dress that looked borrowed, her hands twisting together at her waist. She wouldn’t look up. She kept her chin tucked toward her chest like she was bracing for something.
Greta’s throat closed.
Dallie-Ann had been so certain. Standing in the Summit Outfitters showroom with one hand pressed flat against her chest as she looked at Alice’s flyer.That’s her. She goes by Alyson now. She’s got a baby.Her voice had cracked on the word baby. Greta had driven to Glenhaven the next morning with Bear in the passenger seat and Atlas and King in theback, and she’d let herself believe, for forty-eight hours, that her sister was alive and braiding a child’s hair somewhere behind a fundamentalist fence.
It hadn’t been Alice. It had never been Alice, because Alice had been buried in the mud this whole time.
Greta met the woman’s gaze, and Dallie-Ann’s face crumpled. She pressed the back of her hand against her mouth, and Greta could read it as clearly as if she’d spoken—I’m sorry. I’m so sorry, I thought it was her.
Greta nodded once. It was the closest thing to absolution she could give without breaking down where she stood.You tried. You were the only one who tried.
Ruthie put an arm around Dallie-Ann’s shoulders and pulled her in close.
Even Hatch was here, which was weird because she didn’t really know him, and he certainly hadn’t known Alice. But he stood off to the side of the Valor Ridge group with his hat in his hands.
