Part 3
Grant shortened Flint’s leash without meaning to. The dog glanced back, and Grant loosened his grip.
“I went to the bakery that night.”
“I heard.”
He turned toward her.
“Mrs. Donnelly told me later. She saw your truck.”
Grant remembered the neighbor’s little dog charging the fence whenever he pulled in behind the bakery. He remembered standing beside that fence with his phone against his ear, trying Nora again.
“The recruiter had finally given me a reporting date,” he said. “I’d come to tell you.”
“We’d already gone. The doctor wanted Mom seen there, and then everything happened at once.”
Nora kept walking. Loose stones shifted beneath her shoes.
Her phone had been nearly useless during those days. She charged it in Tess’s car or wherever she could find an outlet at the hospital. She listened to messages while nurses asked questions, put calls off until she knew something, then discovered another day had passed.
Grant had left messages. She’d heard some of them, late and without enough around them to understand what he’d been trying to say.
By the time she returned to Salmon for clothes and medical papers, he was gone.
“I stopped at the shop,” she said. “Somebody told me you’d left for the Navy. Just like that. You’d left.”
Grant watched a narrow wash of water move between stones at the shore.
“I thought you knew.”
“I thought I did.”
He’d waited for a reply, then waited longer. At first, the hospital explained the silence. After a while he’d begun supplying other explanations. Nora understood what his plans meant. Nora didn’t want years of uncertain schedules. Nora had chosen not to say it.
A letter to her apartment came back. One he mailed to the bakery went unanswered. Training swallowed the days, and he learned to keep moving toward the next thing required of him.
“I told myself you’d be better off with somebody who could stay,” he said.
Nora stopped near a bench.
“You could’ve let me decide that.”
“Yeah.”
He didn’t offer the reasoning again.
She rubbed her thumb over a loose thread at her cuff. “Did you ever come back?”
“Once.”
“When?”
He gave her the approximate month. Her hand stopped moving.
“The bakery was locked,” he said. “There was a different name on your mailbox.”
“Mom had died by then.”
Grant looked at her. She kept her eyes on the water.
“I moved closer to Tess after the funeral. Changed apartments, changed my number. I couldn’t afford to keep much of anything the way it was.”
Flint leaned toward something in the grass. Grant let him investigate while Nora drew a breath through her nose.
He had stood outside the closed bakery believing she’d moved on. She’d been somewhere else, grieving her mother, believing he’d never looked back.
They walked the rest of the shore without trying to settle it all. When Nora checked the time, Grant turned them toward the truck. Owen still needed picking up.
That evening, Grant was waiting for a takeout coffee while Nora closed the café. Owen was in the back looking for a library book he insisted someone had moved.
Nora wiped a table, folded the cloth, and said, “I searched for you online once.”
Grant leaned against the counter.
“I found a photograph. Some kind of memorial benefit. You were standing with a woman and a little girl.”
He knew the picture before she described anything else.
“Denise and Molly.”
Nora glanced up quickly.
“Curtis’s family,” he said. “We served together. After he died, a few of us went to the event with them.”
She laid the cloth flat against the table.
“Oh.”
He waited while she absorbed it.
“I didn’t know who they were,” she said.
“No. You didn’t.”
Her eyes narrowed slightly. “There’s something in your voice.”
Grant looked toward the doorway where Owen was still rummaging.
Nora followed his glance. Then she looked back at him.
“The other afternoon. You thought—”
He picked up his coffee.
Nora pressed her lips together. It didn’t work. Her laugh escaped so abruptly that she had to set a hand on the chair beside her.
“You were going to sit there and never ask?”
“It didn’t seem like my business.”
“You knew me well enough to consider asking.”
“I was trying to be polite.”
“You looked like somebody had canceled Christmas.”
“That’s an unfair assessment.”
Owen appeared carrying the missing book.
“Why are you laughing?”
“Your aunt’s enjoying a misunderstanding,” Grant said.
“An old one,” Nora added.
Owen looked from one to the other and gave up. “Adults should write stuff down.”
“That might have helped,” Nora said.
He went for his jacket. Grant held the door while Nora turned out the lights behind the counter.
The next morning, she was packing a canvas bag when he arrived. A folder, water bottles, and wrapped sandwiches sat beside the register.
“I’m going to Salmon after this,” she said. “There are some records I need to collect.”
“Where from?”
She tucked the folder into the bag.
“An old property.”
Owen looked up from a spelling sheet. “Grandma Vivian’s bakery.”
Nora closed her eyes for a moment.
“What?” he asked.
“Nothing. You’re wonderfully efficient at announcements.”
“Thanks.”
Grant waited until she looked at him.
“You still have Bellamy’s?”
“The building, yes.”
“I didn’t know.”
“There’s a lot you didn’t know.”
She said it without sharpness. He nodded toward the bag.
“Want another pair of hands?”
Owen sat up. “Can Flint come?”
“We’re getting papers,” Nora told him. “Not going on vacation.”
“He can watch us get papers.”
Grant left the decision with her. She adjusted the strap of the bag, then looked at him.
“It won’t be interesting.”
“I’ve watched paint dry professionally.”
“That explains a few things.”
An hour later, Owen was in the truck’s back seat beside Flint’s secured space, asking questions at a pace Grant had last encountered during an inspection.
Did Navy SEALs ever get tired? Did Grant like being underwater? Had Flint caught somebody? Could a dog know when a person was lying?
Grant answered some and declined others. He explained that a dog’s work wasn’t best understood as chasing villains, and that much of what mattered looked uneventful from outside.
Owen sat with that for perhaps ten seconds.
“What’s the weirdest place you’ve slept?”
Nora reached for the radio volume, then stopped when Grant began answering. He noticed the movement and let the boy keep talking.
By Salmon, Owen knew that Grant disliked mushrooms, could sleep through ordinary traffic but not Flint scratching at a door, and had no intention of teaching him anything that would get him sent to the principal.
Bellamy’s stood on a short side street. Grant recognized the proportions before he could read the weathered lettering on the glass.
The shop next door had a new tenant. A window he remembered as brightly lit was covered from inside. The bakery’s awning dipped at one end, and dry leaves had collected against the entrance.
Nora sat still after Grant parked.
Owen unbuckled, then waited when she didn’t move…
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