30. Silas
Chapter thirty
Silas
The day after the Whittier meeting, I go back to work. It’s the only sane response to an unsolvable problem: move, stay useful, don’t let it sit in the open where everyone can see it.
I find a corner of the loading dock in the mid-afternoon, when the crew has moved to deliveries and the dock is empty. I sit on a pallet and look at my phone before I dial.
It rings three times.
“Silas Coulter.” The voice that picks up is warm and surprised, with the warmth of someone who wasn’t expecting the call and is genuinely pleased by it. “I thought you’d fallen off the planet.”
“Been busy,” I say.
“Six months busy, or six months avoiding family events busy?”
“Both,” I say.
Declan laughs, the easy laugh of a man who has found his footing somewhere and wears it without effort.
I noticed it at the wedding. He’d always been restless in Larkin, always slightly too large for the space the city made for him, and then he’d gone north with his mate, and he changed.
The restlessness was gone. I’d filed that away at the time without knowing what I was filing it for.
I know now.
“How’s Paxton?” I ask.
“Good,” he says. “Really good, actually. Anya’s sister just had a baby, so the house is chaos, but it’s the good kind of chaos. Why?”
“I have a friend,” I say. “He’s thinking about moving. He’s looking for work and for a place with a different situation than Larkin.”
Silence for a moment. Declan is smart. He’s always been smart, which is why he got out when he did and why he’s not going to ask me directly what I’m not telling him.
“What kind of work is he looking for?” he says.
“He’s good with his hands. Operations, logistics. Managed a crew before. He knows how to run things.”
“Wolf?”
“Yeah.”
“Okay.” He pauses to think. “There’s an opening at the mill. They’ve been looking for the right fit for a while now. Haven’t found it.”
“Tell me about it.”
“Hartley Mill is a timber operation. It’s been running for forty years, family-owned, third generation.
The Hartleys have always worked with the pack here, going back to before I arrived.
It’s a real relationship, not tolerance, not them doing us a favor.
It goes both ways because both sides figured out early that it worked better that way.
” He pauses. “They’ve got five wolves on the floor already.
You know what happens when you put good wolves in a physical operation. ”
“Tell me anyway,” I say.
“Three times the output of a comparable human crew,” Declan says, with the satisfaction of a man who has watched it happen and still finds it pleasing.
“And that’s not running them hard; that’s just what happens when you put the right people in the right work and don’t make them spend half their energy managing how they’re perceived while they do it.
The Hartleys figured that out fast and they don’t take it for granted.
Pay is fair, conditions are good, and when you clock out, you’re done.
Nobody’s looking sideways at you in the parking lot; nobody’s filing complaints because you lifted something a human couldn’t. ”
“And the pack there,” I say. “How does that work?”
“Pack’s been established for a long time.
Smaller than Larkin but tighter, in a good way.
There’s a hierarchy, there’s territory, there’s all the usual.
But it’s not the same friction. The pack isn’t constantly having to justify its existence to the city, and the city isn’t constantly looking for reasons to manage the pack.
” He pauses. “It’s a different baseline. ”
“Meaning?”
“Meaning you walk into a room, and you’re a person first,” Declan says.
“Whatever comes after that, at least you start there. In Larkin…” He stops.
“I grew up there too. I know what it is. And I know what it costs to be what we are inside it, every day, for years. You stop noticing it after a while. And then you leave, and you’re somewhere else for a few weeks, and you see how much of your energy was going into managing everyone else’s reaction to what you are instead of living your actual life. ”
I sit with that for a moment.
“It’s not perfect,” he says. “It’s a small town. People know your business. The pack has politics, complications, and difficult personalities. Being new anywhere takes work.” He pauses. “But the difference is real. I couldn’t have explained it before I lived it.”
“The mill,” I say. “Who would he talk to about the job?”
“Brennan Hartley, the son. His father is still around, but Brennan runs the operation day to day. Good man. Straight with you. If he says something, he means it. If he doesn’t know, he says so.
” He pauses. “I can put in a word, but your friend would need to come up and meet him. Brennan won’t hire someone he hasn’t looked in the eye. ”
“That’s fair,” I say.
“Does your friend have somewhere to stay while he figures things out?”
“He’d need to find a place to stay.”
“There’s a rental on the east side of town. Nothing fancy, but it’s clean and it’s available. I can get the details.” He pauses. “Does your friend have anyone coming with him?”
The dock is empty around me. I rub my hand across my face.
“He’s working on that part,” I say.
Declan is quiet for a moment, and when he speaks again his voice is more direct, the register of a man who has been patient long enough. “Silas. Is your friend actually a friend?”
I look out at the lot. The light has gone long and amber across the gravel.
“He’s thinking it through,” I say.
“Right.” A pause. “Okay.” The word carries everything he’s decided not to say.
“Tell your friend—tell him the first three months are the hardest. But if he can get through the first three months, it gets easier. It gets considerably easier.” Another pause.
“And tell him that Anya and I have a guest room. If he needs it. No questions asked.”
My chest tightens briefly, then releases.
“Thanks, Dec.”
“Call me when your friend makes up his mind,” he says. “And Silas.”
“Yeah.”
“Don’t wait another six months.”
He hangs up.
I sit on the pallet with the phone in my hand and the lot in front of me and let the conversation settle. The thing that has been forming in my chest since the dining room and the loading dock, since before the Whittier meeting, takes on a shape that no longer has soft edges.
Brennan Hartley. Hartley Mill. A rental on the east side of town. A guest room with no questions asked.
I hear the footsteps before I see him.
Greer comes around the corner of the building at an easy pace, the pace of a man doing nothing, having very clearly interfered while pretending he hasn’t. He stops near the dock, not close and not far, and looks out at the lot.
He doesn’t ask who I was talking to. He only stands there for a long moment, and I wait, because Greer only speaks when he’s decided what he’s about to say is worth saying.
“Your father is a good man,” he says finally.
“I know,” I say.
“He built a real business. Out of nothing, even after losing your mother.” He pauses. “That’s not a small accomplishment.”
“No,” I say. “It isn’t.”
Greer nods slowly. He’s still looking at the lot, not at me. “He sees what he can see. And he protects what he can protect. That’s who he is.” Another pause. “It doesn’t mean he can see everything.”
I look at him.
He turns enough so that I can see his profile. It’s the face of a man who has been in this family’s orbit for thirty years, who has absorbed more than is ever said, who has been present for every significant thing that has happened in this operation.
“A man has to figure some decisions out for himself,” Greer says. “Without waiting for permission.” He looks at me directly. “Whatever you’re figuring out, do it quickly. You may have less time than you think.”
“I’ll be inside,” he says.
He goes, and I sit with the phone in my hand and Declan’s voice still in my ear and Greer’s words sitting in my chest alongside everything else.
Figure it out quickly. The window is shorter than it looks.
I already know what I’m going to do.
I’ve known since I walked out of the meeting on Ninth Street and stood in the parking lot and understood there was no version of staying that ended well. Not for the operation, not for the pack, and not for Norah, who stood up to two guys in an alley and defended her right to choose.
Three hundred miles. The first three months are the hardest.
I can work with three months.