Bear stopped six feet behind her. She could feel him there, but still, he didn’t speak. He just stood and let her have the silence.
She stood a long moment. Long enough that the wind shifted and brought the smell of rain from the west. Long enough that her legs started to shake from the climb, and she locked her knees to keep herself upright.
Then she opened her mouth and screamed.
It came from somewhere below her lungs and ripped its way out through her throat. It went out over the valley, and the trees swallowed it.
She pulled in another breath and did it again.
And again.
And again, until her voice cracked and split and her throat went raw and her knees buckled.
Bear caught her. His arms came around her from behind. She grabbed his forearms with both hands and held on, her fingers digging into the muscle there, and she shook.
She didn’t know how long it lasted, but when it finally started to ease, she felt scraped clean, like something cancerous had been pulled out of her.
Finally empty, she went still.
The hollowness felt like relief.
She turned in his arms. Slow, unsteady, her hands still gripping his forearms. He let her move, loosening his arms just enough to let her turn, but not letting go. She ended up facing him with her hands pressed to his chest and his arms still around her, and she dropped her forehead to his sternum and stood there.
“I’m glad you’re a mountain.” Her voice came out muffled against his shirt, rough from the screaming, and startled a small laugh out of him.
“What?”
“You’ve been my rock through all of this. My mountain, keeping me steady. I don’t know what I would have done without you.”
He brought his chin down to the top of her head and held her tighter. “You can lean on me any time you want, Tink.”
She closed her eyes and let him hold her. The wind came across the shelf, and the sky built weather in the west.
Down at the cemetery, Atlas and King had broken free of Nessie and Jax and were running up the trail toward them, side by side. They’d been doing that for days now. Lying next to each other at the house. Walking the property as a pair. Like the dogs had decided something the humans hadn’t said out loud yet.
Greta watched them come.
twenty-eight
Bear had Lila’s textbook open on the kitchen table, the one about equine parasitology, and he’d been staring at the same diagram of a strongyle lifecycle for ten minutes without absorbing any of it. His brain kept tracking other things — the creak of the floorboards upstairs where Greta had gone to take a shower, the dual-dog breathing from the living room where King and Atlas had claimed opposite ends of the couch, the smell of the coffee Greta had made that morning still hanging in the air even though it was past three.
She’d been here more than at her own place for the last week. Not that they’d discussed it. She’d just started showing up with Atlas around dinner, staying through the evening, falling asleep on his couch or in his bed depending on how vertical she was when exhaustion finally pulled her under. Then she’d started leaving things. Her toothbrush appeared in the bathroom holder beside his. A pair of her boots settled by the door next to his work ones. Her SAR pack leaned against the wall in the mudroom, ready to go if dispatch called. Her favorite coffee mug with the cartoon mountain goat sat in the dish drainer more often than it sat in her own cabinet across the street.
He hadn’t asked her to stay. Hadn’t suggested it. But he’d made space. Cleared a drawer in his dresser without telling her. Hung an extra hook by the door. Started buying the dark roast she preferred instead of the medium he could tolerate. Logan had noticed but hadn’t said anything, just started setting three plates at dinner instead of two.
The shower shut off upstairs. Bear listened to the pipes settle. She’d be down in five minutes. He looked back at the textbook. The diagram still made no sense.
Atlas lifted his head from the couch and looked toward the front door a beat before Bear heard the truck pull up. King’s ears went forward but he didn’t move, already learning that Logan’s arrival didn’t require the full-body chaos he brought to everyone else’s.
The front door opened. Logan came through with his backpack over one shoulder and his hair sticking up where his ball cap had been. He kicked his shoes off by the door — that was new, something he’d started doing without being asked after watching Greta do it enough times — and dropped his backpack on the bench.
“You’re early.” Bear glanced at the clock above the stove. Not quite three-thirty. Logan’s shift at the hardware store ran until five on Thursdays.
“Cody closed up.” Logan crossed to the fridge and pulled it open, scanning the contents with the focus of a fifteen-year-old who’d been vertical for six hours and needed fuel. “Said he had to go check on his cabin. The county finally got the road repaired so he can get up there again.”
Bear filed that away. He knew Cody had a place in the mountains — most people in Solace did, the ones who’d been here long enough to buy land before it got expensive — but he’d never been up there. “Everything okay?”
“I guess. He seemed worried about it. Said the flood might’ve done damage and he needed to see for himself.” Logan pulled out the milk and drank straight from the carton.
