Ruth’s gaze flickers and she wipes her mouth. Something is off about her, and it pricks at my skin. I turn back to my notebook, flip through pages and pages of my writing, desperate to find some hint of why a room of my friends is subdued, different in some important way that I can’t see. But another conversation has started around me, and in the din of voices my thoughts scatter like dandelion fuzz, drifting until they catch on something substantial. There in my notes from this morning, doodled in the margins. Dad and the bear. It makes me smile. “Remember that bear that Dad thought followed him around? The one he chased out of our building when I was seven?”

“Before my time,” Sefina says. “But I’ve heard the story from you and all the old-timers here.”

“Hey!” says Ruth, and Sefina laughs.

But Harriet is nodding. “Vance said he’d catch sight of it for years afterward. Said they had a connection.”

“Like his spirit animal?” Sefina says.

“Or just a pesky bear who’d gotten used to scavenging dumpsters for human food,” Ruth says. “But Vance has such a soft spot for animals. It wouldn’t surprise me if that bear had taken to him in some way.”

I smile. “Of course he did. Everyone loves Dad.”

“Bigger than life,” Sefina adds. “And a psychic to boot.”

Harriet grunts. “Or the man just listens to his gut,” she says. “That’s an Alaskan quality, if you ask me.”

I’m half listening now because when I think of Dad and that bear, my thoughts drift to Tate Dunn. We were both seven years old with larger-than-life fathers. His was a fisherman, gone for long stretches of time in the summer, hardly leaving BTI for longer stretches in the winter.