Well, maybe it wasn’t that weird.
Valor Ridge was a family. And families showed up for each other.
Or at least they were supposed to.
But Mason “Hatch” Hatcher was here, and Dallie-Ann was here, and her dad wasn’t.
She’d called him three days ago. Sat at the kitchen table with Naomi’s hand in hers and Johanna across from her and pressed the contact she hadn’t dialed in over a year.
“Greta?”
“Yeah.”
She’d closed her eyes.“Dad, they found her.”
A long silence. Then:“Found who?”
Who else?She’d wanted to scream at him. Who else would she be calling about?
“Alice,”she’d said.“They found Alice. Yesterday. On private land outside Solace. The flood uncovered her.”
The silence had stretched. Then her father had said,“Okay.”
That was it. Justokay.
She’d hung up. Dropped the phone on the table like it had burned her. Bear had crossed the kitchen in three strides and pulled her up out of the chair.
“I hate him,” she had whispered against his hard chest.
“I know,” Bear had said.
So Valor Ridge was here. The townspeople were here. Even Evander was here, standing at the edge of the trees.
But her dad couldn’t be bothered to leave his trailer in Arizona. And who the hell knew where her mom was.
The officiant kept talking. Something about eternal rest. Greta couldn’t hold on to the words. They moved past her like wind across the granite up on the ridge, and she thought about the flyer in her desk drawer.
It had been on the corkboard beside her desk for fifteen years. Alice at sixteen, smiling in the sunshine, platinum-blond hair wild around her face, the leather jacket visible at the edge of the frame.MISSINGin block letters across the top. Greta had pinned it up the week Alice didn’t come home and had never taken it down. She’d walked past it every morning. She’d seen it every time she went to her desk.
When she woke up the morning after the bones were found, she took it down. But she hadn’t been able to throw it out. She’d folded it once. Then again. She’d crossed to her desk, opened the top drawer, and set it inside. Stared at it. Folded paper, faded ink, the last piece of hope she’d been carrying for fifteen years.
And she’d closed the drawer.
The officiant finished. His voice trailed off, and he closed the small leather book he’d been reading from and looked at Greta.
She reached into her jacket pocket and pulled out the folded sheet of notebook paper. She’d written it at two in the morning on Bear’s kitchen floor with Atlas asleep across her feet and Bear and Logan asleep upstairs and the house so quiet even the hum of the refrigerator sounded too loud.
She unfolded it. The paper crackled in the silence.
She didn’t look at the faces watching her. She looked at the casket and read.
“Alice was sixteen when she left. She had this laugh that came from her whole body. You could feel it in the air when she did it, like something had just gotten lighter.” She took a breath and exhaled slowly before continuing. “I’ve been talking to her for fifteen years, like she was still alive, right beside me. In the car. On the trail. In the dark when I couldn’t sleep. I’ve been telling her about my day and asking her what she thinks and imagining what she’d say back, and I?—”
Her voice cracked. She stopped and crumpled the paper. She couldn’t see the words anymore.
“I don’t know if I believe in an afterlife, but I’m going to keep talking to her like she can hear me.” She walked to the casket. “Because I miss you, Alice. I’ll always miss you.”
The funeral director had shown her how the small hinged lid at the head worked—a simple latch, a piano hinge on the inside—and she crouched and opened it now. The interior was cream-colored satin, smooth and cold to the touch.
