Chapter 16 #3
King ambled over, happy and tired, and dropped by his feet with a big sigh.
“Hey,” Bear said. “How was it?”
King rolled onto his side between the chairs and started snoring almost immediately.
“It was… good.” Logan dropped into the other chair. The wood was cold through his jeans. He pulled his hoodie tighter and looked out at the street, the same direction Bear had been looking — at Greta’s house, dark and quiet, the Jeep gone from the driveway. “Where’s Greta?”
“Apparently out of town for a few days with Naomi.” He sounded grumpy about that, just like Ghost. “She’ll be back on Wednesday.”
“Ghost was moping this morning.” He looked at Greta’s porch and thought about her sitting on the log beside him in the dark, telling him about Alice and Naomi’s lead.
She’d told him. Not Bear. Him.
He didn’t say anything else about Greta, and Bear didn’t either. They just sat there in the two chairs with King snoring between them, and the town went quiet as evening fell.
He had been in Montana for a month, and he could count on one hand the times he and Bear had just sat together without either of them bracing for something. This felt different from those. This felt like they’d both decided, without saying so, to not brace for anything.
“I helped X with video editing,” he said finally. “For the ranch’s social media.” He paused. “Did you know he does it to bring in donations? For the program. He’s not just like chasing clout.”
“Yeah,” Bear said. “The ranch was struggling until he came along and started bringing in money with his videos.”
“He… said maybe I could help him this summer. Like as a kind of internship.”
Bear shifted in his chair, the wood creaking under his weight, and looked at Logan with an expression that was hard to read in the fading light. “Is that something you’re interested in?”
“Yeah, maybe. I mean, I like editing videos. And he’s really good at it. At the videos and the riding.” Logan watched a pickup roll past on Maple. “But he told me he couldn’t ride when he got here.”
“He couldn’t.” Bear was quiet for a moment. “Walker put him on a horse his first day at the ranch. Said if he could learn to trust a fifteen-hundred-pound animal, he could learn to trust people again.” He rubbed the back of his neck. “X thought it was the dumbest thing he’d ever heard.”
“Did it work?”
Bear glanced at him. “You’ve seen him ride. Like he’s been in the saddle his whole life.”
Logan looked down at King, who was twitching in his sleep, legs pedaling, chasing something.
He thought about the kitchen that ranch— Johanna’s laugh, Walker’s eggs, Hatch’s tired mug-lift greeting, Ghost moping at the coffee pot with his smashed-and-glued mug, River with his cereal and bunny slippers, and the way Jax carried Oliver through the back door, like it was a completely normal way to show up somewhere.
Bear had been part of all of that.
And then he’d left.
Not because he had to. Because Logan needed somewhere to live.
“You miss it.” He meant to ask, but it came out as a statement. “Being there with them.”
His dad didn’t answer right away. The silence stretched long enough that he almost took it back, almost said never mind, forget it, the way he usually did when he accidentally said something that felt too close to real.
“Yeah,” Bear said finally. “Sometimes.”
Logan kept his eyes on Greta’s dark porch. “You didn’t have to move here.” He’d known that in a vague, background way for a while. “You could’ve— I don’t know. You could’ve sent me to boarding school and stayed at the ranch. Or just left me with the foster family in Denver.”
“Those weren’t options I was interested in.”
“Why not?”
Bear looked at him then. “Because I don’t abandon the people I love.”
Something warm bloomed in Logan’s chest. He looked down at his hands. “Maybe… I can try harder to like it here.”
Bear shifted in the chair again and let out a slow exhale through his nose.
Logan kept his eyes on his hands, on the leather bracelet his mom had given him for his last birthday, because looking at his dad’s face felt like too much right now.
“You might never like it here,” Bear said at last. “But that’s not the point.”
Logan looked up.
Bear was watching the street, his jaw set in that way it got when he was trying to say something that didn’t come easily. “Point is, I love you, and I will give up anything to make sure you’re safe. And I’m not going anywhere, no matter how much you push me away.”
Between them, King lifted his head. His ears swiveled forward, and he stared across the street at Greta’s dark house, at the empty driveway where the Jeep wasn’t.
Bear went still.
Logan held his breath and tracked where King was looking. Greta’s porch. The black windows. The side yard where the fence gate was just a darker shape against the dark.
Nothing moved.
King kept staring.
“Easy, boy,” Bear said, low. “They’re not home yet.” He reached down without looking and rested a hand on King’s head. King didn’t lean into it. He didn’t break his stare either.
A long minute passed.
King’s ears flicked once, then he huffed out a breath and dropped his chin back to the porch boards, eyes still open, still pointed across the street.
Bear didn’t move his hand. He didn’t look away from Greta’s house either.
Logan went back to spinning the bracelet around his wrist. “I think… I’m done pushing.”
“Yeah. Okay. Good.” Bear cleared his throat and abruptly pushed up out of the chair. “Pizza okay for dinner?”
“Yeah.”
Logan stood and stretched, stiff from the cold seeping into the porch boards. He pulled the front door open for his dad and turned to whistle for King.
King hadn’t moved. He was still on his belly between the chairs, chin down, eyes locked on Greta’s house.
“King. Come on, buddy.”
King’s ears flicked back toward him, but the rest of him stayed put.
“King.”
A beat.
Then the big dog pushed himself up and lumbered over. He paused at the threshold and looked back across the street one more time.
Logan followed his line of sight back to Greta’s house and rubbed his hand over King’s head. “What’s wrong, buddy? Do you miss Atlas?”
Something shifted near the hedge.
Logan blinked.
Did a double-take.
Nothing moved.
“Logan.” Bear’s voice came from inside. He was already on the phone with the pizza place. “Still like pepperoni and olives?”
“Yeah.” He stepped in after King and pulled the door closed behind them.
Just a cat.
Solace was full of cats.