Seconds passed.
More footsteps.
And the sound of a door opening.
“Daniel?Daniel.Daniel!”
Jem was halfway to his feet when Lucy ran into the living room, mouth hanging open, face gray.“He’s gone,” she said.“Daniel’s gone.”
8
Tean went into work the next morning, even though it was Saturday.
The rest of the night had been a blur.Sitting in the truck after he’d left the house, with everything Lucy had said crowding him, taking up air in the cab, until there wasn’t room for anything else.And then Jem leaning in through the door, with the smell of cold asphalt crawling in around him, to say Daniel was missing.And then the police.The hours spent calling friends and family, and then driving under the stark umbrellas of streetlights, miles and miles of empty road to look for a fifteen-year-old boy.
And then, when they had gotten home, Jem locking the doors and saying,No walks tonight.
So, Tean had lain in bed until he couldn’t stand it anymore.And then he had sat in the living room, a mug of peppermint tea steaming, then tepid, then cold, until dawn turned the mountains into stamped sheet metal.He stared at the page for the Salt Lake County Jail.Prisoners could only make calls, not receive them.Voicemail service was currently not available.Emails cost fifty cents per message.
He created an account and sent an email.And he kept glancing at the hallway.Kept waiting to see Jem standing there.Kept thinking he was going to get caught.Which didn’t make any sense, because he wasn’t doing anything wrong.
Now, eyes gritty and head pounding, he sat in his office with another mug of tea—this one, a brew of his own decocting, from wild nettles he gathered himself.Which, as he was painfully aware, Hannah insisted on calling hissadness tea, but only since Jem had turned everything in Tean’s life upside down.In the best possible way, admittedly, but still.
Since Tean and Jem had become more than friends (really good friends, as Jem put it—best friends, with a soulmate level connection that you only see once in a million years, even though Tean had explained over and over that best friends with a soulmate-level connection didn’t throw away their friend’s perfectly good underwear they’d had since they were thirty), the office had slowly but steadily undergone a transformation.Jem had added his touch through gifts that were offered at various holidays or, equally often, on no holiday at all, with nothing more than the explanation thatIt was on saleorI thought you’d like it.These ranged from the surprisingly useful (a mug warmer that, if Tean was being completely honest, actually made his homemade nettle tea much more drinkable) to the aesthetic (a poster with the cleverly punctuated wordsDon’t.Give Up.).Jem had given him a leather catchall tray, and a framed photo of the two of them, andtwoframed photos of Scipio.Once, after watching Tean stretch at the end of a long day, he’d brought home a lumbar pillow.So, while the office was still very much the same place it had been ever since Tean had started working here, at the same time—well, itwasn’t.It had changed.The same way Tean had changed.And his life had changed.
Some of those changes, though, had nothing to do with Jem or the uncountable ways he’d made Tean’s life better.And thelatestchange was currently the object of Tean’s focus as he tried to make sense of the paper in front of him.
The memo had been lying on his desk when he’d gotten in, which meant someone had put it there sometime after he’d left work the day before.Which meant not one of the administrative assistants; they’d all gone home.
Utah Division of Wildlife Resources
Internal Memorandum
Date: Friday, October 18, 2019
From: Ed Collins, Deputy Director
Subject: Coordinated Response Protocol
Recent reports and public conversations about predator attacks have brought this issue to the forefront for our stakeholders.It’s important that our Department is seen as Responsive, Proactive, and Coordinated when it comes to these situations.
This updated protocol is designed to make sure everyone is on the same page and that we are presenting a clear and consistent message to the public, the media, and our partners.We need to show that the Department is taking decisive action to protect the livelihoods of Utah Citizens.
By following these steps, we’ll strengthen cooperation with local communities and show that we take their concerns seriously and are ready to respond when issues arise.
And what followed was several pages of, to borrow Jem’s phrase, bureaucratic bullshit.Tean turned the pages slowly, helplessness rising in him until he caught himself breathing shallowly.
A rap at the door made him snap his head up.For a single moment, it was Ed: thick crop of graying hair in a neat side part, big smile, head too big for his neck.And then it was Hannah, frowning at him.
In the last year, his friend and co-worker and the division’s best (and only) native aquatics biologist had changed.Some of that had to do with what she’d been through, including an arrest and a messy divorce.And some of it, Tean suspected, was more—but whatever it was, she hadn’t shared it with him yet.She still wore cargo pants and long-sleeved work shirts, and she still wore her favorite pair of Merrells.She still had the same kind, intelligent eyes that saw more than Tean was sometimes comfortable with.But she’d stopped dyeing her hair, so it was streaked with gray.That wasn’t a bad thing; instead of making her look old, it was simply striking.But it was a change.And it wasn’t the only one.She worked more—sometimes, even more than Tean.She laughed less.
“What are you doing here?”Tean asked.
“What areyoudoing here?”Hannah asked.“It’s Saturday.”
“Trying to catch up on work.Or I was.”Tean flicked the pages of the memo.“Until I saw this.”
Hannah scanned the document.“This is bullshit.”