Page 47 of The Bear Between Us

It's exactly the right instinct and I tell him so.

He finishes his coffee and stands and pauses at the kitchen door. "The girl from the shop," he says. "Nessa. She held up well. Sat in my truck for four hours asking questions I mostly couldn't answer and didn't push when I said so." A pause. "She's going to need someone to give her more than I could."

"Elowen will handle it," I say.

He nods once and goes.

I stand at the kitchen window and look at the forest on the hill and it looks back with the particular quality it's had since the shrine morning, present and quiet and settled, the held breath replaced by something that breathes at a normal rate.

Brennan appears in the doorway. "Perimeter reports are clean," he says. "Third consecutive clean rotation."

"Good."

"I was wrong about her," he says. "Early on. I want that on record."

"It's on record," I say.

He goes back to the operations room and I stay at the window for a while longer and watch the forest and think about what balance feels like when it's actually present rather than just the thing you're working toward.

It feels like this. Ordinary and new at the same time.

37

ELOWEN

Briar and Root smells exactly the same.

It did the day of the ambush too, and I noticed it then with the specific appreciation of someone about to be taken away from something, the particular layered smell of the place registering as precious in the moment before everything went wrong. Today it registers differently. Not as something I might lose. As something I came back to.

The distinction matters more than I expected it to.

Nessa is behind the front counter when I come in, updating the inventory spreadsheet on her laptop with the focused efficiency she brings to administrative tasks she's decided are important. She looks up when the door opens and for a moment she just looks at me, taking in whatever is visible in my face and my posture and the changed mark on my wrist that I'm not covering today.

Then she comes around the counter and hugs me.

I let her. I hug her back.

"Okay," she says into my shoulder. "Okay. You're here."

"I'm here."

She pulls back and looks at me properly, the bright perceptive eyes moving over my face and down to the mark and back up. "You look different," she says.

"I am different."

"Good different or bad different."

I think about that honestly. "Both," I say. "Mostly good."

She nods. "The sheriff told me some things," she says. "Not a lot of things. Enough things to understand that what happened outside this shop was not a gas leak."

"No. It wasn't."

"And the thing that came through the window was not a dog."

"Definitely not."

"And you." She looks at the mark again. "This is why."