Chapter 9 - The Ledger Balanced
Six months later, the walls of the small bakery in Bozeman looked very different from the grey, minimalist hallways of the Walker house.
Every baseboard, every doorframe, and a good portion of the sunny yellow kitchen walls were covered in a riot of permanent marker and crayon—tall sunflowers, sprawling marigolds, and tiny purple blooms whose names nobody could pronounce, climbing all the way up to the ceiling.
Emma stood on a wooden stepstool, carefully adding a bright pink petal to a blossom right next to the bakery's cash register.
The front bell chimed.
She turned around, the yellow crayon still clutched in her small hand, expecting the delivery driver with the flour sacks.
Instead, a massive shadow filled the doorway.
Bear stepped inside, ducking slightly to clear the frame. He wasn't wearing his cut today; he wore a clean denim shirt, though the heavy boots and the road-worn face were the same. Behind him walked Tiny, carrying two enormous sacks of flour over one massive shoulder like they weighed nothing at all.
"Hey, kid," Bear said, pulling a small, foil-wrapped parcel from his pocket and setting it on the glass counter. "Heard you were running low on the good wax."
Emma hopped down from the stool, her sneakers squeaking against the polished wooden floor, and ran straight into the big man's waist, burying her face in his heavy belt.
Bear froze for a second—not out of anger, but out of the sudden, terrifying realization that he actually knew how to hold a kid now. Slowly, awkwardly, his massive, scarred hand came up and patted her hair once, twice, three times.
"How's the art class going?" Tiny asked, setting the flour down with a dull thump that rattled the muffin display.
"The teacher said I draw too big," Emma said, looking up with a wide, bright grin that showed a missing front tooth. "She said the flowers have to fit inside the paper."
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Bear looked around the bakery—at the walls overflowing with orange, yellow, and pink, spilling out past the counter and onto the molding where everyone who walked in could see them.
"Tell her she's wrong," Bear said, his gravelly voice dropping into a low, warm rumble. "Tell her in this house, we don't draw inside the lines. We make our own room."
