Chapter 15
fifteen
As soon as Greta called his name, Bear was running.
He hit the clearing at full speed, and Logan was already coming up off the log.
He didn’t make it fully upright—his knees buckled on the first step, the way legs do after hours of sitting still in the cold—and Bear caught him before he went down.
He went to his own knees on the pine needle floor and pulled his son in with both arms, and Logan’s hands came up and fisted in the back of his jacket.
He was vaguely aware of Greta taking the dogs back down the path, and then there was nothing except the kid—his kid—shaking in his arms. He put his chin on top of Logan’s head.
The boy was already over six feet tall, but still folded into his chest like a much younger version of himself, like the three-year-old with the Spider-Man shirt.
“I’ve got you,” he said into his son’s hair. “I got you, and I’m not letting go.”
Logan shook harder. His breath came in uneven bursts against Bear’s jacket.
“I’ve got you.” He said it again and again, as above them, the last light of day died between the branches.
Then Logan said it.
The word Bear had wanted to hear again for twelve years.
Muffled, face pressed into Bear’s jacket, ragged in a way that made his chest split down the middle.
“Dad.”
He closed his eyes. His hand found the back of Logan’s skull, and he held him there.
He didn’t know how long they stayed like that.
Long enough for the cold to settle into his knees through the pine needles and for the forest to go fully dark around them.
Long enough for the shaking in Logan’s shoulders to slow, then stop, then start again at a different rhythm—shivers instead of the fast, panicked tremor of before.
When Logan finally pulled back, his eyes were red and puffy with tears. “You’re not mad?”
Bear looked at his boy’s face. That little boy who used to ride on his shoulders could almost look him in the eye now.
“No.” His voice came out rough. He cleared his throat. “Christ, no. I’m not mad. I’m just so fucking happy you’re safe.”
Logan wiped his face with the heel of his hand, the way boys did when they didn’t want to be caught crying. The cold had brought a flush to his cheeks and turned the tip of his nose red, and he suddenly looked very young.
“I’m sorry. I— I left my backpack. I know. I know it was stupid.”
Bear shook his head. “I don’t care about the backpack.”
Logan’s breath hitched, and he looked down at the pine needles between his boots. “Kolby said stuff.” His voice was quiet. “About you and Greta. On the porch.” A pause. “He said Mom wasn’t even cold yet.”
Jesus. How did he even respond to that? He wished Walker were here. Or Johanna. Or Nessie. Hell, even Jax would know what to say now.
But they were all at the ranch. He had to do this himself.
“Logan, you know your mom and I were over a long time ago.”
“I know.”
“And my relationship with Greta or anyone else has nothing to do with how I feel about you. You’re my son, and I love you. I’ve loved you from the second your mom handed me that positive pregnancy test. Nothing and no one will ever change that.”
“Okay,” Logan said, softer now.
Bear stayed on his knees. The cold had settled into his joints, a deep, structural ache that he’d feel later, but he wasn’t moving. Not yet. Not until the kid was ready.
Logan kicked at the dirt, then made a face. “Kolby’s a piece of shit.”
Bear almost smiled. “He is.”
“And his mom watches our house.”
“His mom watches everybody’s house.”
Logan looked up at that, and a faint smile touched his lips. “She’s so creepy.”
“She is.”
They sat in the dark for another minute. The forest had gone fully black around them.
Logan lifted his head. “Take me home, Dad.”
Home.
To the house on Maple, not to Denver.
Bear’s throat closed up. “Yeah. Let’s go home, buddy.”
By the time they made it down the trail, the temperature had dropped hard, and Bear’s left knee was giving him a warning ache. He was going to pay for kneeling in the dirt for so long, but it was a price he’d pay many times over because his son had finally called him “dad.”
The parking pullout was empty except for his truck and Greta’s Jeep. She was standing by it with Atlas, the dog pissing on a nearby trail marker.
King sat worriedly at the base of the trail and popped to his feet, tail wagging frantically, when they finally appeared.
He plowed into Logan, tongue flapping behind him like a flag.
Logan stooped, got both hands deep in King’s ruff, and buried his face in the dog’s fur.
The high-pitched sounds King made were more suited to a five-pound puppy than a one-hundred-fifty-pound dog.
Bear smiled and lifted his gaze until he found Greta. She was smiling, too, and laughed when Atlas decided to get on the action, and the dogs tackled Logan, licking away the tears.
Christ, she was beautiful.
He wanted to thank her, wanted to ask her what she’d said to Logan up there, what story she’d told, but the words jammed up in the back of his throat.
And the more he looked at her, the more he realized it didn’t matter.
She’d done what he couldn’t. She’d found Logan.
More than that, she’d broken down the kid’s defenses.
She was good at that.
She’d been working on Bear’s since the moment they met, and—he realized now—he never stood a chance of resisting her.
She touched his arm as they reached her, and he saw the question in her eyes: “You okay?”
He nodded. “Thank you.”
It wasn’t enough. But those two words were all he was capable of at the moment.
She squeezed his bicep, then stepped back toward her Jeep and whistled for Atlas. “You know where to find me if you need anything.”
Logan went straight upstairs.
Bear stood at the bottom of the staircase and listened to the footsteps cross the hall overhead, heard the door close, and then the house went quiet except for the refrigerator cycling and King settling onto the kitchen floor with a grunt.
He put his hand on the newel post and held it. Then he went to the kitchen.
He stood at the counter with both palms flat on the surface and stared at the backsplash until the grouting blurred.
He put the kettle on. He made two mugs of tea, the box Nessie had left in the cabinet months ago, and set them on the counter and didn’t drink either of them.
He checked his phone. He put it face down.
He stood and listened to the particular quality of the silence from upstairs — not the silence of an empty house, but the weighted, specific silence of someone lying very still, trying not to be heard.
He’d cracked his knuckles through half the drive home, and he was doing it again now without noticing, one hand, then the other, a sequence he couldn’t stop once he’d started.
Around nine, when the thin yellow line under Logan’s door had been there for two hours without moving, Bear went to the foot of the stairs. He stood there for a beat in his socks on the cold hardwood. Then he climbed.
He tapped his knuckles on the door.
“Come in.”
Logan was on the bed with his back against the headboard and his knees pulled up, his phone face down on the comforter beside him. He looked at Bear when the door opened, and Bear looked back, and neither of them said anything for the space of three full seconds.
Bear looked at the floor. Then at his son.
The desk chair was small — meant for homework and a lanky teenager, not a man built like a load-bearing wall.
Bear pulled it out from under the desk and sat in it anyway, knees up near his chest, because sitting on the floor felt like too much and standing in the doorway felt like not enough. He folded his hands between his knees.
“I need to say something,” he said. “I need you to let me finish before you say anything back.”
Logan’s jaw tightened. He nodded.
Bear looked at the wall behind Logan’s head. He’d been finding the words for this for six weeks, and they were exactly as bad coming out as he’d known they would be.
“After I got out,” he said, “I came back. I drove to Denver. I went to your mother’s door.”
Logan went still.
“She told me—” He stopped. Started again.
“She had a lawyer. She said if I made any attempt at contact — with you, with her, with anyone in her family — she would file a restraining order, and I would lose any legal right to you. Permanently.” He kept his voice even.
“I was four months out of Montana State. I had a felony on my record and forty dollars in my wallet and nowhere to go. She had a lawyer.” The words sat in the air between them.
“I made the wrong call. I should have fought harder. I didn’t.
And I’ve been carrying that every day since. ”
The room was quiet. The refrigerator cycled again downstairs. King’s nails clicked once on the kitchen floor and then went still.
Logan’s hands were in his lap, working the leather bracelet around his wrist in small circles. He didn’t look up. When he spoke, his voice was flat and careful, like something he’d had prepared for a while.
“She told me you didn’t want me. That you chose to stay gone.” He paused. “That you never once tried.”
Bear closed his eyes.
He sat with it. He sat with the full weight of what Amber had told this kid for fifteen years, the shape she’d given his absence, and he thought about the visiting room in Montana State, the three-year-old with his hand flat on the glass.
He thought about the door in Denver. The lawyer’s name on the letterhead.
The long drive back across the state in a truck that barely made it to the Wyoming line.
“I wanted you every day,” he said. His voice came out rough, ground down to something he didn’t often let surface. “Every day. For fifteen years.”
Logan rolled onto his side, facing the wall, and Bear couldn’t see his face anymore.
He stayed in the chair. The thing in his chest that wanted to stand up, to cross the room, to put a hand on his son’s shoulder — he let it exist without doing anything about it. Logan needed the wall right now. He could have it.
The chair creaked under him when he shifted his weight.
The Star Wars comforter, the Nikes kicked under the bed, the paperback face-down on the nightstand.
The walls that still smelled faintly of fresh paint because Bear had rolled them three weeks before Logan arrived and the house breathed it back out slowly, day by day.
After a long time, Logan said, “She was my mom.”
“I know.”
“You’re not allowed to be mad at her.”
Bear thought about that. He let himself actually think about it instead of reaching for the easiest answer.
“You can be,” he said. “You’re allowed to be mad at her. And love her. Both at once, at the same time.” He paused. “One doesn’t cancel out the other.”
Logan said nothing. But his shoulder moved — a small, involuntary shift, like something in him had to adjust to make room for the idea.
The clock in the hallway ticked. The house settled around them.
Eventually, Logan said, “Are you? Mad at her?”
Bear thought about Amber in the doorway of the Denver apartment, the lawyer’s name already on the papers in her hand. He thought about the visiting room and the juice box and yes, I’m coming home soon.
“Sometimes,” he said. “Mostly I’m just sorry it cost you both so much.”
Another long stretch of quiet.
Logan reached out and put his phone on the nightstand. The movement was slow, like a decision.
“Can you leave the hall light on?” His voice was rough, smaller than it had been.
“Yeah,” Bear said.
He stood. The chair legs dragged on the floorboards as he pushed it back under the desk. He crossed to the door. He stopped with his hand on the frame.
Logan lay curled on his side under the comforter, a fifteen-year-old boy in a house that was still becoming a home, his mother six weeks in the ground, his phone on the nightstand instead of his hand.
“Goodnight,” Bear said.
“Goodnight, Dad.”
Bear pulled the door around, leaving a bar of yellow light across the floor from the hall. And then… he couldn’t make himself move away. Like if he left this hallway, he’d never see his son again. He stood with his back against the wall, and stared at the ceiling.
He counted the seconds until he could breathe again. When he got to sixty, he pushed off the wall and walked back down the stairs.