Part 5
Her name was Bethany Wells.
She lived outside Eau Claire, Wisconsin, with her husband and two boys, and she had reported Natalie missing almost a year earlier. The report had faded into the familiar gray area reserved for adults who were allowed to leave, even when the people who loved them believed something was wrong.
“She texted me sometimes,” Bethany told Caleb during their first call. “But she stopped sounding like herself. She used to call me Bee. After she met Harlan, every message started with Bethany, like a customer service email.”
Caleb stood near the kitchen window while Eli slept in the carrier at his feet. “Did you know she was pregnant?”
A pause opened on the line.
“No,” Bethany said. “I found out from Paige. I found out I had a nephew from a stranger.”
Caleb had no useful answer, so he gave her silence.
Bethany came to Montana four days later. She was thirty-four, with Natalie’s dark hair and the same careful way of holding her mouth when she was trying not to cry. She arrived carrying a small suitcase, a folder of old photographs, and a blue knit baby blanket their grandmother had made years before.
June met her on the porch.
The dog stopped several feet away and lifted her head. Bethany crouched without reaching for her.
“Hi, June Bug,” she whispered.
June crossed the porch in three limping steps and pressed her forehead into Bethany’s shoulder. Bethany wrapped both arms around her, and whatever control she had carried from Wisconsin loosened there in the cold.
Caleb waited until June stepped back before bringing Eli outside.
Bethany did not touch him at first. She looked at him the way someone looks at a picture that has survived a fire, grateful and afraid to handle it. Then she set one finger in his open palm, and Eli closed his hand around it.
“He has her chin,” she said.
Bethany stayed in Elk Fork for a week. She met with Paige, Deputy Torres, Nora Valdez, the prosecutor, and the attorney appointed to represent Eli’s interests. She visited the place under the pines, where the county had allowed a small marker, and she arranged a memorial service after Natalie’s body was released.
Only fourteen people came.
Audrey stood beside Caleb. Don and Marcy came, along with Paige, Jenna Torres, Nora, and three women who had been moved from Rosegate House. None of the women spoke at the service. One of them placed a folded paper crane on Natalie’s casket and walked away before anyone could thank her.
June lay at the foot of the casket the entire time. Milo, who had not been invited but had escaped his leash with impressive commitment, sat under Caleb’s chair until the funeral director pretended not to notice.
Afterward, Bethany remained near the cemetery fence, looking toward the mountains as if trying to understand how her sister’s life had ended so far from home. Caleb waited until she called him over.
“She used to bring home broken things,” Bethany said. “Birds, kittens, once a raccoon baby she was absolutely not qualified to rescue. My mom would get furious, and Natalie would say, ‘Somebody has to try.’”
Caleb looked down at June. “She tried all the way to the end.”
“She trusted the dog.”
“She trusted whoever answered the door.”
Bethany wiped her face with both hands, an impatient motion that reminded him of Natalie in the video. “That’s the part that gets me. She didn’t know you. She didn’t know if anybody lived up there or if the dog would make it.”
“No.”
“But she sent him anyway.”
That night, Bethany and Caleb watched the rest of Natalie’s videos at the kitchen table. Nora and Jenna had approved copies for Bethany after investigators secured the evidence. Most of the recordings were practical: dates, names, transactions, threats, who drove which van, who came to Rosegate with papers and left with sealed envelopes.
The last video was different.
Natalie sat in the same van as before, but Eli slept against her chest and June’s head rested on her knee. She had been trying to make her voice steady and not quite succeeding.
“Bee,” she said, “I don’t know if you’ll ever see this.”
Bethany covered her mouth.
“I’m sorry I stopped calling. Harlan said he knew where you lived. I kept thinking if I stayed quiet, he’d leave you alone. Then I stayed quiet so long I didn’t know how to come back.”
On the screen, Natalie looked down at her son.
“If something happens to me, don’t let guilt make Eli’s life smaller. Love him. Tell him about me. But put him where he’s safest, even if that isn’t with you.”
The video ended with Natalie reaching toward the camera. Bethany sat long after the screen went dark, her hands folded in front of her so tightly the knuckles had gone pale.
“I came here thinking I had to take him,” she said.
Caleb did not move.
“I thought that was what a sister would do. What an aunt would do. I thought if I didn’t, it meant I failed her twice.”
“You’re his family,” Caleb said.
“So are you.”
“I found him in a storm.”
Bethany looked toward the nursery, where June slept across the doorway. “You rebuilt your house around him before the county promised you anything. You know which cry means hungry and which one means he’s about to make everyone regret being alive. He looks for your voice.”
“He’s young enough to learn someone else.”
“I know,” she said. “That’s why I’m not making this about how much it would hurt you.”
She opened the folder of old photographs and slid one across the table. Natalie and Bethany stood as teenagers beside a lake, both of them sunburned, both smiling with their arms thrown around each other.
“I want him to know us,” Bethany said. “I want him to come to Wisconsin. I want my boys to grow up knowing their cousin. I want to tell him Natalie was more than the worst thing that happened to her. But I don’t think taking him from the first safe place he’s known honors what she asked me to do.”
Caleb looked at the photo. “You don’t owe me this.”
“I’m not giving you permission,” Bethany said. “I’m giving the court my opinion. Eli is not a reward for whoever loved Natalie most.”
She wrote a statement supporting continued placement with Caleb and a future adoption if the court found it appropriate. Paige warned them that the process could still take months, that criminal proceedings could complicate timelines, and that no one should build certainty on a case still moving through the system.
Life continued anyway, because babies did not respect legal uncertainty.
Eli gained weight. He learned to smile without warning and to scream whenever a sleeve trapped his hand. Milo discovered that the nursery gate could be pushed with enough determination. June took up her post beside the crib and tolerated Eli’s small feet kicking against her ribs with the patience of an animal who had already decided what mattered.
Audrey kept visiting. Sometimes she came with medical instructions, sometimes with groceries, and once with a box of children’s books because she said Caleb’s shelf contained only survival manuals and one depressing biography of Ulysses S. Grant.
One evening, after Eli finally fell asleep, Audrey and Caleb sat on the porch with coffee going cold between them.
“You watch him differently now,” she said.
“How?”
“When I first met you, you watched every exit.”
“I still do.”
“Sure. But you watch the crib first.”
Caleb looked through the window, where June’s shape blocked the nursery doorway. “It makes more noise than the exits.”
“The crib?”
“My life.”
Audrey smiled into her cup. “You say that like it’s a complaint.”
“It isn’t.”
He did not tell her that he knew the sound of her car before it turned into the clearing, or that on nights she did not come by, the cabin felt as if one lamp had been left unlit. Those truths were still new enough to need quiet around them.
The call came from Eli’s attorney on a Thursday morning while Caleb was folding laundry one-handed with Eli in the sling.
Harlan Price had filed a petition from county detention claiming he was Eli’s biological father. Until the claim was resolved, the court would not move forward with any adoption plan.
Caleb stood very still.
“There will be testing,” the attorney said. “And likely a hearing. He is also asking the judge to remove Eli from your home immediately.”
From the nursery, Milo barked once, and Eli laughed for the first time. Caleb looked toward the sound while the attorney kept speaking…
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