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“If it happens,” he amends, smiling as if to ease my panic. It doesn’t reach his eyes.
“I’m …” I shake my head, unsure what to say. “I’m so sorry.”
He nods slowly. “It’s not the craziest thing in the world, for people to go missing up here. It happens more than you think. Especially when people aren’t smart. Deacon, he wasn’t smart. You don’t go out there alone.”
Silence lingers as I search for the right words. I’ve caught myself imagining what Agnes went through, when Mabel’s father didn’t arrive at his destination. That fleeting worry, as I kiss Jonah goodbye before he climbs into his plane, that it’ll be the last time I kiss him, is always present. But I’ve never imagined Jonah going out one day and disappearing without a trace. My stomach roils at the thought. “That must be hard, to not have any answers after so long.” No sense of closure. No peace.
“Yeah.” Toby scratches at his bristly beard. “My mom still drives up there and goes out looking for him every summer. I think she’s accepted reality, but she’s too stubborn to give up completely.”
“He’s her child.”
“And Deacon knew what he was doin’. There’re people who have no clue how to survive heading out into the middle of nowhere. Thinkin’ Alaska’s like any other trail hike.”
“I don’t know how anyone would go out there thinking that.” I don’t know what else to say except, “I’m sorry about your brother.”
“Yeah … So that’s why I ended up coming back to Trapper’s Crossing. Deacon was the one who wanted to take over the family business. I was workin’ at a shop in Anchorage with plans to go out on my own one day.” He shrugs. “Now I’m back here.”
Much like my father came back to Alaska Wild. Though, it was always the plan he’d run the company eventually. But tragedy struck, forcing him home sooner than he’d expected.
Clearly, Toby feels the same sense of obligation to his family’s legacy. But is he doing so willingly, or because it is expected of him?
Sometimes I wonder what I would have done, had my father—in those final weeks, once our relationship had been mended—asked that I carry on the Fletcher family business. Barring the fact that I’d have no idea how—Agnes and Jonah would surely have helped—how would I have felt, pressured into following my family’s footsteps rather than having a choice in my own path?
Toby heaves himself off his perch on the couch. “I didn’t want to tell you about it, given how nervous you already seem to be around here, but I figured you would have found out, anyway.”
And there I was, on the first day we met, making jokes about tying meat to my neck and leaving me out for the bears. No wonder he had that weird look on his face. I unwittingly stuck both feet in my mouth.
“Do me a favor?” Toby wanders over to the bookshelf and holds up the wildlife book Jonah gave me for Christmas. When he speaks again, his tone is lighter. “Promise you won’t go off in the bush alone because you’ve read this cover to cover.”
“I can’t even walk to the pen to lock the goat up without thinking something’s waiting in the trees to run out and kill me.”
He chuckles, sliding the book back in its spot. “You have a bit of a wild imagination, don’t you?”
And stories like the one about Deacon’s brother certainly don’t help, but I keep that to myself.
I’m about to offer Toby a drink when a hard knuckle raps against the glass window panel of our front door, startling me.
“See? Don’t worry. I won’t be heading into the forest alone!”
Toby’s laughter trails me as I head to answer the door. A courier waits outside, bundled in a heavy coat. He grips a thick, legal-size envelope from my father’s estate lawyer and a signature machine in his hands, the tips of the gloves cut off, his naked fingers poking out.
A strange sensation overwhelms me as I scrawl my name in the box and collect the envelope, mumbling my thanks.
I know what this is.
In the months that followed my father’s death, I’ve faced a wide range of feelings when talking about my inheritance—shock, guilt, sadness, discomfort, regret—but at no point would I say I was “excited” for it. It felt wrong to look forward to the day the money hit my bank account, given the cost—my father’s life, my family’s legacy.
But now I’m back in Alaska, living a life that I believe would make my father happy and proud, and it’s in part because of the money he left both of us.
I feel a thrill coursing through my veins over all the new possibilities.
Chapter Seventeen
“They found the bear sitting on top of the hiker, eating him!” My eyes are wide with horror as I read the rest of the report out loud. “And then it attacked and mauled three of the searchers!”
Jonah’s electric toothbrush buzzes through the cracked bathroom door, but I know he can hear me.
I continue scanning the list of fatal bear attacks, unable to shake the heavy feeling that’s been clinging to me since Toby left this afternoon, after telling me about his missing brother. “This other bear? It dragged the guy out of his tent at night. And then it mauled two other people before someone shot it!” I scan further. “Oh my God. This one? It broke into their cabin and—”
