Chapter 26 #2
Greta drifted. She watched the candle flames bend in a draft she couldn’t feel.
She watched Atlas’s ribs rise and fall. She watched the porch light through the window and the faint silhouettes of the men outside, shifting position now and then but never leaving.
Once she thought she heard Walker’s voice low against the glass, asking something, and Johanna stood and went to the door and murmured back and returned.
Once a truck door closed down the street.
Once Atlas lifted his head and put it back down.
She didn’t cry again. She didn’t know if she had any more in her or if the tide had just gone out for a while.
The mug went cold in her hands.
Around nine-thirty, the rain started up again, soft against the windows. The room smelled like beeswax and eucalyptus and the faint honey-sweet thread of the alyssum on the coffee table, and somewhere under that, the savory smell of whatever Nessie had warmed on the stove for the men outside.
Greta sat in the middle of all of it and let it move around her.
She was hollowed out. Not empty exactly — still aching, still raw — but past the point where she could pretend anymore.
Past the point where she could make the small adjustments that kept other people comfortable.
Grief had stripped something out of her.
Some social muscle that usually kept her polite.
She could tell it wasn’t coming back tonight.
So when the door opened at ten, she lifted her head and looked.
Evander Cole stood in the doorway with his hat in his hands and Tilly sitting at his boot, his weathered face half in shadow. He’d talked himself into coming on the drive down. She could see him already wondering how to get back out.
Something in Greta’s chest hitched.
Cole didn’t do this. He didn’t come to town.
He’d bought land in the backcountry after he left Valor Ridge and built a cabin and lived there alone except for the dog, and in the three years since, she’d seen him maybe a dozen times — always on contract work, always in the mountains, never here. Never in Solace. Never at her door.
He’d driven all the way in. For her.
The same way he’d ridden out for Naomi the summer she went missing, because Greta had called him at three in the morning and said I need you, and he’d been at the gate of Valor Ridge by sunrise with Tilly in the truck bed and a rifle and no questions.
He’d never asked her why he’d come. She’d never asked him to stay.
That was the shape of it between them. He showed up when it mattered. That was the only language he had.
He was here. In her doorway. Hat in his hands.
“You okay?” His voice came out low and rough. Like he hadn’t used it in a while.
She nodded, and her throat closed up. “Yeah.”
He looked at her a long time. He tracked from her face to Atlas sprawled across her lap, to the women arranged around the room, to the flower pot in her lap and the quilt around her shoulders.
He turned the brim of his hat between his hands. “I’m sorry, Greta.”
The way he said her name almost broke her again.
“Thank you for coming,” she said. And she meant it. She meant it in a way she hadn’t meant any of the thank yous she’d said tonight. “I know what it cost you to drive in.”
He worked his jaw. He didn’t answer that. Couldn’t, probably.
She should have left it there. She knew, even as she opened her mouth, that she should have left it there.
Cole had said what he came to say. He’d shown up.
That was the gift. All she had to do was let him turn around and go back to his truck and the long dark drive home, and the strange, mostly-silent friendship she’d been building with him for years would stay intact.
But she was wrung out and hollow and past the point of managing anyone’s comfort, including her own.
“How are you doing?” she asked.
He flicked his gaze back to her face.
“After the flood,” she clarified. “Your land. Naomi said the creek took out your cabin.”
He shifted his weight. Looked at a point somewhere past her left shoulder, then back at her face. “I’ll rebuild.”
“Why?”
His expression went flat. “Why?” he echoed.
Stop. Stop.
She didn’t stop. She looked at him — really looked at him, fifteen years of reading what people didn’t say out loud bringing him into focus.
Cole was lean and hard the way men got when they worked their bodies past the point of comfort and kept going.
His beard was wild and his hair was too long and his hands, when he turned the brim of his hat between them, were scarred and callused and steady.
His eyes weren’t steady. He’d been running for a long time.
She didn’t think he knew how to stop, and she had spent years pretending not to notice because she’d needed him too.
She’d needed a friend who didn’t ask her hard questions, and he’d needed one who didn’t push, and they’d built the whole thing on a careful agreement not to look at each other too closely.
She was going to break it. She could feel herself breaking it.
“Maybe it’s a blessing in disguise,” she heard herself say.
Across the room, somebody made a small sound. Johanna tightened her hand on the edge of the coffee table.
Cole just stared at her.
“Losing the cabin. It forced you out of hiding. Same way this—” She stopped. Swallowed. Started again. “Same way knowing about Alice forces me to face reality.”
“That’s not the same thing.”
“It’s exactly the same thing.”
“No,” he said, deadly quiet. “It’s not.”
She held his gaze. She was on the floor with Atlas in her lap and a blanket over her shoulders, and she was wrung out and hollow and reckless.
“You’re lonely, Evander. You’ve been lonely for a long time.”
The room went so quiet she could hear the rain on the porch roof.
Cole didn’t move. He didn’t argue. He didn’t blink. He just stared at her, and she watched the door closing behind his eyes, the wall she’d somehow managed to breech going back up.
Dammit. Why had she said that? He hadn’t come here for a mirror. He’d come because she was hurting.
And she had hurt him back.
“I’m sorry,” she said, fast. “Evander—”
“Good luck with it all.” Flat. Polite. He’d already left. His body just hadn’t caught up yet. He set his hat back on his head. “Take care of yourself, Greta.”
“Cole—”
He was already turning. Tilly rose and followed him without a sound.
The screen door slapped shut behind them, and Greta watched through the window as Cole crossed the yard in four long strides and kept going, his silhouette swallowed by the dark beyond the porch light’s reach.
His truck started up somewhere down the street, the engine rough and low, and then the sound faded and he was gone.
She closed her eyes.
“Greta,” Naomi said quietly.
“I shouldn’t have said that.”
“No. Probably not.”
She pressed her face into Atlas’s neck. Her chest hurt in a new place now, a smaller, sharper place than the Alice place, and she didn’t know how to feel both kinds of pain at once. She’d just lost two people in one night. One forever, and one for a long, long time.
The door was still open and Bear filled the frame. “What did he say to you?”
“Nothing.” She shifted Atlas’s weight in her lap. “He’s fine. I’m fine.”
“Greta—”
“It wasn’t him, Bear. It was me. I pushed him. He’s a friend,” she said and her voice came out small. “He’s my friend. And I hurt him.”
Bear was quiet a moment. “You want me to go after him?”
She shook her head. “He wouldn’t talk to you. He won’t talk to anybody for a while now. That’s how he is.”
Bear worked his jaw. He looked past her, out the window, to the place where Cole’s truck had disappeared, and his expression did something complicated. Not jealousy—she’d been watching for that, half-expecting it, and it wasn’t there.
After a beat, he nodded. “Okay.”
But he didn’t move from the doorway. He hovered there like he wanted to say or do something more.
Greta let her head fall back against the couch with a groan. “I should have just thanked him and let him go.”
“Cole will come back around,” Naomi said quietly. “He just needs time.”
Time. Yeah, maybe. But she wasn’t sure she believed it. She knew Evander Cole. She knew how long time could mean with him.
“You’re allowed to be a mess tonight, Greta,” Johanna said. “He’s not going to hold this against you.”
“And if he does, sugar,” Mariah added, “then he’s got the emotional range of a screen door, and that’s not your problem to fix.”
“But he came all the way into town.”
“I know,” Johanna said.
“He never comes into town.”
“I know, sweetheart.”
Greta closed her eyes again. Johanna was right. So was Mariah. But she couldn’t help but worry she’d cost herself a friend tonight. And God knew that man didn’t have very many friends to lose.
She’d say sorry tomorrow.
She’d say sorry next week.
She’d say sorry for a year if it took a year. Cole was worth a year of apologies, and she’d send every one.
But tonight, she didn’t have anything left.
“She’s had enough company for tonight,” Bear said and finally stepped into the room.
Greta heard them moving after that, but only in pieces.
Coats off hooks. Maggie’s voice was low at the door.
Lila saying call me if you need anything, I mean it.
Mariah’s hand on the top of her head in passing.
Johanna’s lips against her temple, the words get some sleep, sweetheart, somewhere near her ear.
The sound of plates being covered in foil. The kitchen light snapped off.
She didn’t track any of it.
Naomi crouched in front of her. “I’m glad you finally have answers. And I know it feels awful now, but tomorrow you can start healing.”
Naomi did know. She was speaking from experience.
She leaned in and kissed Greta’s forehead. “I’ll be back tomorrow to help with everything.”
Greta nodded. Couldn’t manage anything else.
Bear shut the door behind Naomi and crossed the room without a word. He bent down, slid an arm under her knees, another behind her back, and lifted her off the floor like she weighed nothing. He carried her to the couch and sat with her in his lap, turning her so her face tucked against his chest.
She went without resistance. She didn’t have the energy to resist, and she didn’t want to.
She pressed her face into the hollow of his throat and breathed him in.
His heartbeat was steady under her cheek, slow and even, and she focused on it—counted the beats, breathed with the rise and fall of his chest, let it anchor her when everything else felt like it was spinning out.
He didn’t say anything. Neither did she. There was nothing to say.
Alice was dead.
She’d been gone for fifteen years, and Greta had spent those years building a life around not knowing, around the hope that maybe, somehow, her twin was still out there.
She’d been holding herself together all night. Holding herself upright, holding herself steady, holding herself in place so the women could come and sit with her and say the things people said.
But she didn’t have to hold herself together anymore.
Bear was doing that for her.