Chapter 9
nine
The toast was burning. Bear got to it before the smoke alarm triggered, pulling the rack out and dragging the blackened slices onto the cutting board. He scraped the worst of it over the sink and listened to the ceiling. Logan’s room. The creak of the old house settling in the cold. No footsteps.
He poured his coffee and stood at the counter.
The kitchen window faced Maple Street. Greta’s house was dark across the road, the Jeep already gone—she left early when she had a morning group going out, and today apparently was one of those days.
The street was empty except for a pair of crows hopping along the curb two houses down.
He watched them for a moment, then looked back at his toast.
His phone buzzed on the counter.
An unknown number with a 406 area code. He answered it.
“Mr. McKenna.” A woman’s voice, measured and professional. “This is Jennifer Hayes from Lewis and Clark County Child Protective Services. Do you have a moment?”
His coffee stopped halfway to his mouth.
“Yeah,” he said. “Go ahead.”
She didn’t waste time, which he appreciated even as it made everything worse. A woman named Patricia Wexler—Patty—had filed for emergency guardianship of Logan. Amber’s maternal aunt.
He vaguely remembered her attending his and Amber’s wedding all those years ago. A skinny woman with a constantly pinched expression, she’d disapproved of them getting married so young and made her displeasure known even at their wedding.
But she lived in Missoula, had a stable home, no criminal record, and had submitted documentation citing Bear’s manslaughter conviction and incarceration history as grounds for removal.
He should’ve seen this coming.
“I want to be transparent with you,” Hayes said. “This is a legitimate filing. The court will require a response, and you’ll need representation.”
“I know.” He set the coffee down. “How soon?”
“The preliminary hearing is in six weeks. Nothing will happen before that, and given the timeline and Logan’s age, the judge isn’t likely to grant emergency removal without significant cause.
” A pause. “I also want you to know that I’ve received a few minor complaints from a neighbor.
I’m not treating them as actionable at this time, but I want you aware they exist.”
“Which neighbor?”
“I’m not able to share that. What I can tell you is that two complaints have been logged. The first was last week. The second came in yesterday morning.”
He glared out the window, past Greta’s house to the big yellow house on the other side. Joy Roberts. There wasn’t a doubt in his mind that nosy bitch was watching his every move. She’s already told anyone in town who would listen that she was not happy about an ex-con moving onto her street.
“As I said, I haven’t found them credible enough to follow up on. But Mr. McKenna—” She stopped, chose her next words. “If there’s anything in your current situation that could be characterized as unstable or high-risk, now is the time to address it.”
“Understood.”
“I’ll be conducting a home visit within the next two weeks. You’ll receive written notice. Is there anything you want to tell me about Logan’s adjustment that you’d like on record?”
He thought about Logan going up to his room yesterday and not coming back down until he had to go to school this morning. “He’s adjusting,” Bear said. “It’s hard. We’re working on it.”
“Good.” Another pause. “I’ll be in touch.”
She hung up.
Bear stood at the counter and looked at his phone until the screen went dark, then he looked out the kitchen window at Greta’s house.
STOP LOOKING.
And Greta’s response to all of it was to keep going. Keep pushing. Keep putting herself in dangerous situations.
Anything in your current situation that could be characterized as unstable or high-risk…
That was Greta in a nutshell.
Fuck.
He turned away from the window, and another thought struck, stopping him dead in his tracks.
He was supposed to return to work at the ranch tomorrow, but working at a ranch filled with ex-cons wouldn’t look good either.
He needed another job.
Lila’s clinic sat at the far end of Main, a low building with a gravel lot and a hand-painted sign that had weathered decades of Montana winters.
The waiting area had three plastic chairs, a rack of pet food, and the persistent smell of antiseptic and wet dog that Bear had come to associate with useful work.
He’d been helping Lila in informal stretches since his second month at Valor Ridge—muscle she needed when an animal needed holding down, hands she needed when equipment gave out.
He’d never asked to be paid. She’d never offered.
He found Lila between appointments, stethoscope around her neck, chart in hand, standing at the pass-through window between the reception area and the back hallway. She looked like she’d slept three hours. She probably had.
“Bear.” She closed the chart. “Everything okay?”
“I need a job,” he said. “Full disclosure: I don’t have a vet tech certification. I’ve got field medic training, four years working with Walker and the horses and dogs at the ranch, and a record. If none of that disqualifies me—”
Lila set the chart on the reception desk. She looked at him for a long, quiet second, then smiled. “I’ve been waiting for you to ask for months.”
He exhaled in a rush. “I’ll have to talk to Walker.”
“You know what he’ll say.”
Yeah, he did. Walker never expected his guys to stay at the ranch forever. “Can I start today?”
“I can use the help.” She handed him a work list without waiting for him to agree.
Three fence repairs in the paddock behind the clinic.
A supply delivery that needed to be moved from the loading dock to the storage room.
Two large-breed dogs coming in at noon that would need restraint during their exams.
He went to work.
The fence took two hours. Good work, the kind that asked something of him physically and gave him the silence to think without the thoughts filling the whole room.
Hammer, nail set, post driver. The paddock backed against a stand of pine and smelled like turned earth and pine resin and the nearby stable.
He worked his way down the line, testing each post, replacing the ones that had heaved during the spring thaw.
King watched him from the fence gate, deeply unimpressed.
At ten-thirty he carried the supply order inside—six boxes of vaccine stock, four of surgical supplies, two of the large-breed dietary kibble Lila stocked for the ranchers who came in from the northern county.
He stacked them against the back wall of the storage room and checked them against the invoice, found one discrepancy and set the mislabeled box aside to deal with later.
He was refolding the invoice when he heard movement from the room at the end of the hall.
Luke was here. Lila hadn’t mentioned it, but it made sense that she wouldn’t have left him alone.
He went to the doorway and knocked once on the frame.
Luke sat on the edge of the narrow bed with his forearms on his knees and his head down, staring at the floor between his boots.
He’d showered—his hair was still damp—but the bruise on his jaw had deepened overnight to a color that made the whole left side of his face look wrong. He didn’t look up when Bear came in.
Bear pulled the desk chair away from the wall and sat down. The room was small enough that their knees were almost touching.
He didn’t say anything. Luke would talk or he wouldn’t.
After a long while, Luke said, “You don’t have to do that.”
“Do what.”
“Sit here. I know she asked you to.”
“She didn;t even tell me you were here.”
He lifted his head, finally. His eyes were red-rimmed, wrecked. “You don’t have to babysit me.”
“I’m not babysitting you.” Bear leaned back in the chair. “I’m just sitting.”
Luke looked at him for a moment, then back at the floor. His jaw worked. “I remember the accident. I wasn’t that drunk.”
“The blood test says different.”
His mouth went flat. Then he nodded once, slow. “Yeah.”
That was all. Bear didn’t fill in the silence. They sat in the small room with the sound of Lila’s clinic going on around them—a phone ringing, the back door opening and closing, a dog somewhere raising a protest about its exam—and the silence between them held.
Lila found them twenty minutes later. She stood in the doorway for a beat, looked at Luke, looked at Bear, and then said, “The two o’clock moved to noon. I need you.”
He got up. Followed her out. In the narrow hallway, she stopped with her back to the wall and pressed both hands flat against it, a woman holding the building up or the building holding her up. Bear stopped beside her. He didn’t touch her, just stood close enough that she could feel him there.
“He’s not going to get better if I keep making it easier,” she said. “I know that.”
“Yeah.”
“I just can’t—” She stopped. Pressed her lips together and breathed through the rest of whatever the sentence was going to be. After a moment, her shoulders came down. “Okay. The retrievers are coming in. I need you on the big one. He hates strangers.”
The retrievers came and went. The afternoon moved forward on clinic time—exam after exam, a quick call out to a ranch on Route 9 with a colicking mare that turned out to be mild, a farm call that delayed them an hour.
By the time Bear loaded the last of the supply order corrections into Lila’s truck for her, the light had gone flat and gray and the temperature had dropped back to something grudging.
He drove home with his hands loose on the wheel and his mind doing what it had been doing all day in the background—running calculations.
Why couldn’t he be attracted to Lila?