Chapter 22
Logan
Pawsitive had been quiet all day. Lachlan had handled the arrests and the processing of the drug runners.
Travis pulled his cameras off the fence line by noon.
Beckett and Cooper stopped by in the afternoon to help me check the back acreage for anything the runners had left behind, and the answer was nothing.
The shed was empty, the access road was just a dirt road, and the tire tracks were already filling in with dust.
Lark wasn’t in the barn. She wasn’t in the house either, or at any of the kennels, or in the feed room restocking shelves the way she did when her hands needed something to hold.
I checked the office, the cat room, the goat pen.
Tova followed me through all of it, unbothered by the search, content to go where I went.
“Where’s Lark, girl?”
Tova looked up at me with her goofy grin and then started sauntering toward the east pasture. Sure enough, Lark was there.
She was lying on her back in the grass beyond the paddock fence, arms at her sides, face turned up to a sky that was starting to go orange along the ridgeline.
She didn’t have a clipboard or a phone or a list in her hand.
There was no pen behind her ear, no half-finished chore pulling her toward the next one.
She was just lying there, flat on the ground, doing absolutely nothing.
I stood for a moment and watched her. In the weeks I’d been at Pawsitive, I could count on one hand the number of times I’d seen this woman be still.
She was always reaching for the next task before the current one was finished, always filling silence with plans or jokes or updates on Frank’s ongoing campaign to eat himself into another weight class.
Stillness wasn’t something Lark did. It was something that happened to other people while she managed everything around them.
Tova and I walked the rest of the way over to her. She didn’t open her eyes until my shadow crossed her face.
“There you are,” I said.
“Here I am.” She squinted up at me. “I’m watching the sky change colors. I keep thinking I should get up and do something productive, and then it turns a slightly different shade of orange and I decide to stay for one more minute.”
“How many one-more-minutes are you up to?”
“Eleven.” She patted the grass beside her. “Want to stay for twelve?”
I lowered myself down next to her. The ground was cool, and the grass was tall enough to brush my forearms when I folded my hands behind my head.
Tova circled once between us, found a spot that met her standards, and dropped with a huff.
Her chin landed on her paws, and her eyes closed before the rest of her had fully stopped moving.
For a while, we didn’t talk. The sky kept doing what it was doing, the orange deepening into something closer to copper, the ridgeline going sharp and dark against it.
A breeze moved through the pines along the south boundary and carried nothing with it except the sound of being a long way from anywhere.
The low-grade unease I’d been carrying for weeks was gone. The tire tracks, the cut fence, the shed door hanging open, all of it had been answered and put away. The back acreage was forty acres of grass and trees and a draw that ran east to west, and that was all it was.
“Clarence learned a new word today,” Lark said.
“From who?”
“Beckett. He was helping you check the back fences this afternoon, and Clarence was on the porch railing. Beckett stubbed his toe on the step and yelled ‘motherfucker’ about three feet from the parrot.”
“Don’t tell me. Clarence immediately repeated it.”
“Oh yes. Three times. With increasing conviction.” She turned her head toward me, and the fading light caught the scatter of freckles across her nose. “I now have a parrot who knows eighteen profanities and one of them is a compound word. Beckett owes me a therapy session and a written apology.”
I laughed. A real one, the kind that started in my chest and surprised me on the way out, and Lark grinned at the sound of it.
We lay there and let the evening settle around us. Tova’s breathing had gone slow and even between us, and the sky above was draining from copper into something deeper.
“Can I ask you something?” Lark said.
“You can ask me anything.”
“Last night.” She said it carefully, feeling for the edges of it. “During the operation. Did you have any problems out there like you were concerned about?”
She was asking about the PTSD. She wanted to know if it had come for me in the dark.
“It flickered,” I said. “One of the truck doors slammed, and the sound went wrong. For about half a second, the clearing wasn’t a clearing anymore. I was back in the military.”
“Did it last long?”
“It didn’t have a chance to take hold. Hunter was in my ear before it got there. Said my name, gave me something to do. By the time I responded, I was back.”
She was quiet, turning that over.
“That’s what I trained Tova to do,” she said. “Give someone an anchor. Something real to follow back when the trigger grips.”
“It works.”
She nodded. “What Hunter did was the same concept. A voice, a weight on the chest, pressure at the pulse point. It doesn’t matter what form it takes. What matters is that it’s there.” She paused. “That’s all Hunter did. He gave you something to follow back.”
I stared at the sky and turned that over.
Hunter’s voice had found me in the dark last night, calm and specific, pulling me back from a clearing that wasn’t a clearing anymore.
Tova had been doing the same thing for weeks, climbing onto my chest at three in the morning with breathing so deliberate it overrode my own.
Two different forms of the same principle, and both had worked because someone was paying attention.
“I wish Reid had had that.”
The words came out before I was ready for them. They just surfaced, the way things do when you’ve been holding them under for long enough.
I knew Lark didn’t know who I was talking about, but she didn’t push. She waited.
“Reid was my best friend.” I kept my eyes on the sky because it was easier to talk to than her face.
“We enlisted around the same time, ended up in the same unit. Did three deployments together. A decade of the same mud and the same firefights and the same bad food and the same nights where you don’t sleep because the things you saw that day won’t let you. ”
I pulled a blade of grass from the ground and turned it between my fingers.
“He was the one person I never had to explain anything to. Everyone else, I had to translate. My parents, my friends back home, the guys I worked with after the Army. They all tried, and I appreciated it, but there was always a gap between what I was saying and what they heard. Reid didn’t have that gap.
He’d been standing next to me for all of it. ”
“What happened to him?” Lark’s voice was quiet.
“He killed himself. A little over nine months ago. Eight months before I came to Garnet Bend.”
She didn’t turn toward me. She stayed on her back with her face to the sky and let the words have the room they needed.
“I didn’t know he was struggling that bad,” I said. “That’s the part I can’t get past. We talked. We checked in. He called me on a Tuesday night three weeks before he did it, and we talked about a fishing trip we were planning for the fall. He sounded fine. He sounded like Reid.”
The sun had dropped below the ridgeline, and the light had gone soft and indirect, the kind that erases edges.
“I found out because his sister called me. I was in my truck driving to a jobsite and her name came up on my phone, and I knew before I answered. He shot himself.”
Lark’s hand moved in the grass between us, close to mine but not touching, and the space she left there felt like permission to keep going or stop.
“I’m so fucking pissed at him.”
Something shifted in my voice when I said it. A door I’d been keeping shut swung open.
“I know you’re not supposed to say that about someone who was in that much pain. But honestly, I don’t care. I’m so fucking furious.”
“Tell me why,” Lark said.
“Because he knew me.” I sat up. The stillness I’d found lying in the grass couldn’t hold what was moving through me.
“He knew I would have come. He could have picked up the phone at two in the morning and said I’m drowning, and I would have been in my truck before he finished the sentence.
I would have sat on his floor for a month. I would have done anything he needed.”
Tova lifted her head and watched me, her ears forward. Probably wondering if this was a nightmare or not. I certainly wondered.
“But he didn’t ask,” Lark said.
“He didn’t ask. He was my family, damn it. Not by blood, by choice. By a decade of choosing each other every single day in places where that choice mattered. And he didn’t give me a chance to help him.”
I picked up a rock from the grass and rolled it in my hand, pressing my thumb into the flat side of it hard enough to feel the grit.
“You know what gets me? I’m living proof that recovery can work. You put Tova in my cabin, and that dog pulled me back from nightmares I couldn’t get out of on my own. I’m sleeping so much better, and everything feels so much more solvable because of that. I know I’m not alone.”
I set the rock down.
“Reid didn’t have any of that. No anchor. And I can’t stop thinking that if he had, if somebody had put a Tova next to him or, hell, even Clarence with all his motherfuckers and colorful language, maybe it would’ve given Reid whatever it was he needed. Maybe he’d still be here.”
The pasture was quiet. Tova had moved closer, her shoulder pressed against my leg.
“I miss the fuck out of him, and I’m so goddamned pissed.”
I wanted to punch something.
“And then I hear myself saying all of this, and I feel like a—” I stopped.
Tried again. “Reid wasn’t some guy who forgot to make a call.
He was in pain. The kind of pain I know, because I’ve been close enough to it to recognize the address.
When it’s that loud, you can’t hear anything else.
You can’t see past it far enough to pick up a phone. ”
My hands were gripping my knees. I made myself let go.
“So what does it make me, being angry at a drowning man for not waving?”
The silence held. Lark sat up beside me. She didn’t rush to fill it, and I could feel her choosing her words with the kind of care that meant they mattered.
“You remember that woodpile I chopped?” she said.
I looked at her.
“You handed me an axe and let me destroy a cord of firewood, and when I was done, you told me I was allowed to be angry. That the rage was mine and I was entitled to every bit of it.” She held my eyes. “Nobody had ever said that to me. And you stood there and told me it was mine to have.”
Her hand found my arm, just above the wrist.
“Being angry at Reid and understanding why he couldn’t reach out aren’t two different things, Logan.
But they live in the same place. You’re angry because you loved him.
Because you would have shown up. That’s not selfish.
” Her fingers tightened on my arm. “That’s what love sounds like when it doesn’t have anywhere to go. ”
The anger didn’t leave. The grief didn’t leave. But they found a different arrangement inside my chest, one that wasn’t crushing the air out of me. I could carry them both if they weren’t stacked on top of each other.
I covered her hand with mine.
“Reid was my family,” I said again, quieter this time.
“He was my brother in every way that mattered. And the guys last night, Hunter, Beckett, Coop, they’re the same thing.
Hunter was in my ear during that operation, not because of a command structure.
Because he knew what I carry and he was watching for it. ”
“That’s what people do when they care about you,” Lark said. “They pay attention.”
I looked down at Tova, who had put her chin on my knee. “Like you. You put a dog in my cabin because you saw what I needed and decided I didn’t get a vote.”
“You definitely did not get a vote.”
“My point is that family isn’t always the one you were born into. Sometimes it’s the people who show up. Who pay attention. Who put a dog in your cabin. Blood has nothing to do with it.”
Lark was quiet for a while. The sky above the ridgeline had gone from copper to a deep, bruised purple, and the first stars were pressing through.
“Speaking of, I’ve been thinking about calling my family,” she said.
I turned to look at her. She was watching the sky, her jaw tight, holding something she’d rather not hold.
“My parents,” she said. “To ask them for money.”
I knew what it would cost her to pick up that phone.
“The drug runners may be gone, but the acceleration clause hasn’t gone away,” she said. “My family has money, Logan. More than enough to get me out of this jam without even knowing it was missing. It would solve the problem.”
She said it flat and practical, her voice stripped down to the bones of the problem.
“It’s the only path I can see.”
I didn’t argue. I didn’t tell her not to do it, because it wasn’t my call and, honestly, I didn’t know how to come up with that kind of money either. I took her hand and laced my fingers through hers, and we sat there in the grass while the last of the light drained out of the sky.
The ridgeline went dark. Tova shifted between us, pressing her weight against both our legs, and Lark’s thumb traced a slow line across my knuckle.
We stayed until the stars came out.