Page 33 of Befriending the Bear (Forestville Silver Foxes #6)

CALLOWAY

I t had been a week since the phone call with my mother, and something in me had settled.

Not everything, of course. There were still moments where the echo of her voice tried to creep back in, offering doubts in the form of concern, clinging like the last stubborn leaves on the maple outside my window.

But something fundamental had eased within me—like the knot I’d been carrying under my ribs for forty-three years had finally begun to loosen.

I wasn’t fixed. That was never the point.

I was healing.

The morning light filtered through the front windows of the cottage, soft and golden, highlighting the fine dust floating lazily in the air. It was one of those rare, clear winter days in Forestville, where the frost didn’t bite so much as kiss, and the sky stretched out blue as cornflowers.

Fraser had gone up to the Bear Creek Campground early to help Macallister take down some fallen trees.

He’d been there yesterday as well, and he’d loved it.

On good leg days, he could still do that kind of work, albeit slower, and he told me he liked the solitude of it, the camaraderie of working beside someone who understood wear and tear in bones and in memory. I understood that.

I stood at the kitchen window, watching birds flitter around the feeder I’d hung. A nuthatch landed, flipped upside down on the suet cage, and blinked one shiny black eye at me.

“You and me both,” I murmured to the glass. “Always hanging on in strange ways.”

I felt different this week. It wasn’t something I could show or explain. But I’d woken up without that first moment of guilt. I’d brewed my tea without the old ache in my chest. I didn’t count the days anymore. Not since Fraser. Not since I’d written about After .

It turned out that the chapter had been the dam holding everything back.

Once I’d written it—really written it, not just dodged around the grief with metaphor and implication—it had all changed.

The rest of the memoir flowed like thaw water.

I wasn’t writing for anyone else anymore.

There wasn’t a deadline. No agent. No workshop peers to impress.

Just the truth. Just me on a page, finally whole.

My phone rang. Janet. Where I normally would’ve let it go to voicemail, I now didn’t hesitate.

“Hi, J-janet.”

“Calloway.” The shock in her voice that she actually had me on the line was obvious. “How are you, honey?”

“I w-wrote something,” I said.

“You—what? You mean the chapter?”

“M-m-more than the chapter,” I said. “I finished the whole thing.”

The line went utterly silent for a moment, the kind of quiet that prickled through the air like anticipation before a storm. Then: “Calloway…are you serious?”

“I am.” I stepped away from the window and leaned against the countertop, the wood cool beneath my fingertips. My voice was steady, even with the occasional hitch. “I d-don’t know if it’s publishable or even p-p-polished. But it’s done. It’s mine. And I think… I think I’m p-proud of it.”

Janet let out a soft laugh. Relief, maybe, or joy. Or both. “God. I’ve waited so long to hear you say that. I don’t care what shape it’s in, I just want to read it.”

“You’ll g-get it. I just w-want to do a thorough r-read through. You’ll b-be the first.”

“I’m honored.”

“Th-thank you for b-being so patient.”

She clicked her tongue. “Of course, darling. You sound different.”

Wasn’t it telling how easily she’d picked up on that? Apparently, even over the phone, the difference was audible. “I feel it. Something s-shifted. The book changed b-because I changed.”

There was a beat of silence, and then, softly, “Does this mean you’re ready to submit the piece for the anthology?”

I laughed, a little shaky but genuine. “Yes. I think I am.”

“Okay,” she said, a smile in her voice. “Send it today?”

“Just let m-me finish my tea.”

“Deal.”

We ended the call, and I stood in the stillness that followed, not empty like it used to be, but full. Quiet, but warm. Like tea steeping, like a voice waiting to be heard.

I opened my laptop and pulled up the short piece for the anthology I started over a year ago but had only had the title at the top: Life After Loss. Like with my memoir, I hadn’t been able to write anything else because I hadn’t been living. I’d been existing. Surviving.

After taking a deep breath and closing my eyes for a moment, I started to write, and once I did, the words poured out of me.

Moving on is the most overused expression when people talk about grief.

They mean well when they tell you not to linger in your sadness but move on, but they never tell you how to do that.

How do you keep moving when your whole world has fallen apart?

How do you embrace the passage of time when you want it to freeze and even turn back?

Moving on, I’ve learned, isn’t about forgetting.

It isn’t about “getting over it,” like grief is a puddle you can just hop across if you take a running start.

Moving on is remembering how to live, even with the hollow still there.

It’s making space at the table for the absence, but setting the table anyway.

It’s letting the silence sit beside you without letting it swallow you whole.

After Marcus died, people stopped speaking his name. They tiptoed around it, like saying it would make my grief worse instead of easing my loneliness. But grief is not made heavier by memory. What made it unbearable was feeling like I was the only one still carrying him forward.

Grief isolates not because others don’t love you, but because their lives resume at a speed you can’t match.

They return to routines, to emails and errands, while you remain tethered to the stillness left behind.

It’s not their fault. It’s not yours either.

But it can make the world feel like it’s speaking a language you’ve forgotten.

I learned to smile and nod, to say, “I’m doing okay,” when what I meant was, “I don’t know who I am without him.” But slowly, over months, then years, I carved out a new shape of myself—one molded not in spite of the loss, but around it.

Healing didn’t come in grand gestures or revelations. It came in small things: the first time the sun looked beautiful instead of cruel. The first laugh that didn’t feel like betrayal. The first morning I didn’t count the days since he was gone.

And eventually, the first time I let myself reach for someone new. Not because I stopped loving Marcus, but because I’d learned that love, too, is renewable.

It’s not a betrayal to keep walking, to move on, to find a life after loss. It’s the deepest form of honor.

I paused, blinking the sting from my eyes, and reread what I’d written. Wasn’t it fascinating how, sometimes, I didn’t even know what I felt until I put it into words? The truth was right there, in my own words, but I hadn’t known it, hadn’t felt it until I’d written it down.

Jesus’s famous words on how the truth will set you free had always been an empty cliché to me, just like the encouragement to move on.

But now I felt them on a different level.

He’d been right. The truth did set you free…

but you had to be ready to see it, to allow it in.

And now that I had, the freedom had come.

I did a last reread, then sent it off to Janet. The memoir would follow once I was done rereading it.

I heard the front door open with its familiar squeak. Fraser was back. Even if he hadn’t been the only one with a key, I would’ve known it was him by the rhythm of his steps, the measured tap of his cane, the way the house seemed to shift and expand when he entered it.

“Calloway?”

“In my office,” I called back.

He stepped in moments later, snow dusting his beanie like he’d borrowed a scene from a postcard. His cheeks were pink from the cold, beard wet at the edges where snow had melted into silver. He looked…alive. Exuberant. His eyes found mine and softened.

“Well, you look like a man who’s accomplished something,” he said, bending in to press a cold but welcome kiss on my lips. “What have you done? Reinvented the Dewey Decimal System?”

I grinned. “I finished the p-p-piece for the anthology.”

“Calloway, that’s incredible.”

“I sent it to Janet right b-before you came home.”

Fraser pulled me up from the chair and into a hug that lifted me off my feet. I laughed into his shoulder, warmth blooming in me like spring breaking through the frost.

I threw my arms around his neck and kissed him. No hesitation. No holding back. I kissed him because I was proud, because I was here, because I could.

When I pulled back, he stared at me like he was seeing something entirely new and entirely familiar. “You’re glowing,” he said reverently.

“It’s the lighting.”

“It’s you.” He brushed my face with his fingers. “It’s you coming back to yourself.”

We stood there for a long moment, the cold behind him fading fast, warmth pooling between us.

“I’m so damn proud of you,” he murmured.

I leaned back enough to meet his eyes, breath still caught in my chest. “I c-couldn’t have done it without you.”

Fraser shook his head. “You did this, sweetheart. I was just cheering you on.”

He kissed me, soft and lingering, like he had nothing else planned for the day except making sure I knew I was loved.

When we finally pulled apart, breathless and laughing, I touched his cheek. “Tea?”

“How about hot chocolate? It feels like a hot chocolate kind of afternoon.”

“I think that can be arranged.”

He followed me into the kitchen, taking off his beanie and loosening the moss-green scarf that matched his eyes and the pattern of his flannel plaid shirt. The man had an endless collection of them, and I’d grown stupidly fond of them.

“How was M-Macallister?” I asked as I rummaged through my cupboards, looking for the cacao.

“Good. We got through the last of the felled trees.”

“Sounds like we b-both got work done.”

Fraser snorted and gave me an affectionate look. “He’s a good man. Quiet, but good.”

“You l-like it up there.”

His lips twitched, thoughtful. “I do. Reminds me of the old fire camps. Peaceful.”

My fingers tightened around the mug I had just filled with cacao mix. “Will it f-feel like that for you in M-montana?”

He considered that for a moment, then stepped forward, settling his hands low on my hips. “Probably, but that doesn’t mean I’ll want to stay. You are my home now, my family.”

Warmth filled my chest. It still surprised me how easily he said things like that. How often. Like he was still amazed I hadn’t somehow backed away from all this.

“You n-n-know I’m scared, right?” I asked softly, stepping closer, resting my forehead against his shoulder.

He wrapped his arms around me again. “I know. But you’re still saying yes. That tells me everything I need to know.”

And then the other truth came out, the one that also needed to be put into words. “I love you.”