No photographs. No receipts. Nothing that tells me more about him.
I’ve spent so long noticing what people shed—names on scraps, numbers scribbled and dropped, the trail everyone leaves without knowing it. He leaves nothing. There’s not one thing in this wallet he didn’t choose to put there.
Stone scrapes stone behind me.
I have his wallet in one hand and his jacket over my arm.
He comes in and reads the cave in a single pass—pack, ledge, me, what I’m holding. He’s carrying a large bag and a paper cup. He sets both on the ledge.
“Still warm,” he says, nodding at the cup.
Heat climbs the back of my neck. I set the wallet down and leave my hand loose at my side, like I wasn’t just standing in the middle of his den, going through his stuff.
“I wanted to know more about you,” I admit, because why lie? “There was almost nothing to find.”
“No.”
“It’s not a home.” I lift the jacket an inch. “You have other places like this.”
“A few.”
“Those aren’t homes either.”
He thinks about it, unbothered. “No.”
He crosses to the low rock near the cot and sits, elbows on his knees, hands clasped. “You could have asked.”
“I know that.”
“Ask me now.”
I collect the cup on my way to the cot and pull the lid. Tea. Milky and strong and still warm, like he said. I complained about tea exactly once—that first day, tied to a rope outside this cave, being difficult on purpose. He never answered me. He heard me, though.
Something in my chest goes warm, and it isn’t the cup.
I sit across from him. “Where do you come from?”
He doesn’t make me work for it. He just starts.
“Cascades. North range. My mother and father held a territory up there. A sister, too.” He watches me. “They’re still there. I left at twenty and didn’t go back. It’s what bears do. You love your family, and then you find your own ground. Bears bond for life when it happens. But the family you’re born to… That, you leave. It’s our nature.”
“So you’ve been alone since twenty.”
“In the way bears are alone.” One shoulder moves. “I tracked on my own for eight years. Then Viktor found me. He needed a tracker who didn’t sit on anyone’s roster. I needed work worth doing. That’s the whole of it.”
I study him. “No tragedy.”
“No.”
“Nothing you’re running from.”
“Would you like there to be?” Dry. No heat in it.
I almost smile. “No.”
He tips his chin at me. “Then tell me yours.”
I look down at the canvas of his jacket. He has the working version already—the drops, the proof-of-life pieces, the months of feeding scraps through a gap behind a hardware store while I told myself none of it could hurt anyone. I gave him that the morning after the dragon, and he knows it all.
