Chapter 8 #2
He did. He checked his watch and stood, tucking the chair back under the table. He paused at the kitchen doorway. “Call me if you need anything.”
She nodded. “You’re a good friend, Bear.”
He checked on Luke before he left—still on the couch, still out, breathing steady. Bear pulled the blanket higher and turned off the overhead light, leaving only the small lamp in the corner.
He let himself out into the cold.
She’d been on his steps long enough for Atlas to fall asleep across her boots, the cold working through her fleece, when the truck finally turned onto Maple.
The passenger door opened first.
Logan came out fast and jogged up the porch steps.
“Greta,” he said. Barely a grunt. Like father, like son.
“Logan,” she said back.
He went inside. The door didn’t slam. It just closed with the soft click of someone pulling it carefully behind them, and that small carefulness told her more than a slammed door would have.
Bear stayed in the truck.
She watched the dark shape of him behind the wheel, his silhouette too large for the truck, one forearm resting on the top of the steering wheel.
She could see his head tipped slightly forward.
Not looking at anything. Just sitting. A man who had been awake too long with nothing solved and no good place to put any of it.
She wasn’t sure she had anything better to offer. She’d come across anyway.
He got out eventually, and the truck rocked on its frame as he unfolded himself from the seat. He came around the front of the truck, stood for a beat on the walk, and looked up at her on the porch.
“Hey,” he said.
“Hey.” She shifted Atlas’s head off her boots and came to the edge of the top step, her arms loose at her sides. “How’s Lila?”
Bear tucked his hands into his jacket pockets. “She’s home. Luke’s in the spare bed.” A pause. “I sat with her until she stopped shaking.”
Greta nodded. She believed that entirely—she could see it in the set of his shoulders, the residue of someone else’s crisis still sitting on him. “And you think signing Luke out was the right call?”
Bear looked up at her. The porch light caught his face, throwing the planes of it into shadow. “I don’t know what else I was supposed to do. Lila asked me. And Lila never asks anyone for anything.”
It was a true thing to say. That made it worse.
She came down the steps, crossing her arms over her chest. The cold was sharper here, off the porch. Their breath rose and disappeared in the dark between them. “Doesn’t mean it was the right thing to do.”
He scowled. “Lila’s been carrying that family alone for years. I wasn’t going to leave her standing in that lobby at midnight with nothing.”
“I understand loyalty.” She met his eyes. “But Luke got behind the wheel drunk. And you walking in there and signing his paperwork—that’s not standing in her corner. That’s making it easier for him to do it again.”
He didn’t respond, so she pressed on.
“I’ve been on search and rescue calls where we pull drunk people out of cars they’ve wrapped around trees.
I’ve dragged—” She stopped herself, recalibrated.
“I’ve seen what it looks like when someone keeps covering and covering and covering, and then one night they run out of luck. I’ve seen what they leave behind.”
“Luke won’t do that to Lila.”
“He almost did tonight.”
His teeth clenched so hard, she swore she heard the grinding from where she stood. “He’s been through a lot. He needs time, not jail.”
“I know.” The whole town knew what happened to Luke Garrison two summers ago.
A wildfire had claimed his entire hotshot crew, and he hadn’t been able to do anything but stand lookout on a granite cliff overhead and watch it happen.
“What he needs is therapy. And for you and Lila to stop enabling him.”
“What was I supposed to do? Tell Lila no? Tell her to deal with it herself?”
“I’m saying being in someone’s corner doesn’t mean handing them a get-out-of-jail card.” She let the words sit. “It means telling them the hard thing. It means saying this is the line, and here’s what happens if you cross it again.”
Bear shook his head and climbed the steps. “Not everyone has the stomach for the hard thing at midnight when someone they care about is sitting at a kitchen table shaking.”
She stayed planted in his way on the top step, arms crossed. “No, they don’t.” She heard the edge coming into her own voice and tried to pull it back. Failed. “But you, of all people, should understand what it costs when a man loses control, and someone else ends up paying the price.”
He froze.
She couldn’t even tell if he was breathing.
She knew what she’d done. She’d known it before the sentence was out of her mouth and she’d said it anyway, and now she had to stand here and watch it land on a man who’d been carrying the weight of one terrible night for fifteen years—a man who was three days into trying to raise a grieving teenager and twelve hours into bailing out someone else’s crisis and probably hadn’t slept properly in a week.
She watched it happen on his face and hated herself a little.
He didn’t defend himself. Didn’t come back at her.
Didn’t tell her she didn’t understand or ask her who the hell she thought she was to say that to him, which would have been fair enough.
He just stood there with his hands at his sides and his jaw tight and his eyes showing something she couldn’t read in the low light.
When he finally spoke, his voice was quieter than before. “You’re not wrong.”
She waited.
“I didn’t know what else to do. That’s all.” With that, he picked her up and bodily moved her out of his way like he was moving nothing more than a yappy dog.
She spun toward him as he yanked open the door. “Bear—”
“Goodnight, Greta.”
“But—”
The door shut in her face.