Chapter Three

Mara’s POV

I took Route 9.

Of course I took Route 9. It was the only road that led straight from my apartment to the supermarket, the pharmacy, and the second job I had picked up on Tuesday mornings cleaning offices downtown. Avoiding it would have added 40 minutes to my schedule that already was tightly packed.

That’s what I told myself. I was very good at telling myself things.

I didn’t tell myself why I had looked at my phone four times before I left the apartment. Or why I’d stood in front of the bathroom mirror an extra two minutes for nothing, doing nothing to my appearance and then getting annoyed with myself for those two minutes.

Lily had been watching me from the kitchen table over her cereal bowl, wearing that particular look she’d been rehearsing since she was fourteen… the one that translated “I see you but I’m not going to say anything just yet I’m filing this away.”

“You look different,” she said.

“I look exactly the same.”

“Your jaw is doing that thing.”

“My jaw doesn’t do things.”

It does, when you’re thinking about something you don’t want to think about. ” She pointed her spoon at me. “What happened last night?”

“Flat tire. I told you.”

“You also checked your phone three times while making coffee, which you never do because you say mornings are for…”

“Being present. I know what I said.” I gathered up my keys. “I have the Calloway offices at eight. Don’t be late for your exam.”

She was still looking at me with that expression when I shut the door.

Route 9 was quiet at 7:40 a.m.

The rain from last night had left everything washed, clean and shining… the asphalt dark, the tree line on the left side of the road wide green against a pale sky. I kept my hands on the wheel both my eyes looked forward and not where I had pulled over last night.

I looked at the place where I had stopped last night. The shoulder was empty. Of course, it was deserted. No one had any business standing on the shoulder of a country road at 7:40 in the morning… not a tall, silver-eyed man with a voice like he had decided sound was beneath him.

I looked forward again.

My phone was in the cupholder. Quiet. I’d read his last message “I don’t fully know yet” like eleven times before I’d made myself put it down.

She was like, “Oh no he answered! disarming enough from that answer that I had not been ready for. I had expected something deflecting. To a vague and male answer designed to make me feel like I was asking for the moon by asking for an explanation.

But what he did say was: “I don’t completely know yet” as if honesty was just what you did. I didn’t know what to do with that.

I had been just about two miles beyond the place where I’d stopped last night, right where the trees were thickest on either side and the road dipped a little, when I felt it.

The same sensation as last night. That shift. That electrical charge in the air, like pressure shifting before a storm. My hands tightened on the wheel on their own volition. Every hair on my arms raised up under my jacket.

I looked in the rearview mirror. There’s no one behind me on the road. I checked the trees to the left. Nothing. Nothing. Just the thick morning shadow between trunks, the slow drip of last night’s rain from leaves…

“Movement.”

I caught it in my peripheral vision. Something between the trees, keeping pace with the car. Low to the ground, too large for a deer, too fluid for…

I pressed the accelerator.

The thing in the trees sped up.

My pulse, which had been meticulously controlled until now, decided to go off on its own And I watched as the speedometer increased…fifty, fifty-five… And I stared as the treeline and the thing moving through it moving as quickly, shadows tearing out, branches distracting in a trail exactly matching my car.

I grabbed my phone from the cupholder.

I wasn’t calling him. That wasn’t what I was up to. I was going… I was going to call… I glanced at my recents and the only new entry was right on top and before I could finish the debate with myself, my thumb tapped on it. It rang once.

“You took the road,” he said. No hello. As if he’d been watching.

“There’s something in the trees,” I said. My voice was steadier than I should have been given credit for. “On the left side. It’s been running along side my car for about thirty seconds. It is big, it is fast, and it’s not a deer.”

A beat of silence. The focused kind. Not the unsure type.

“How far beyond the dip in the road are you?”

“I just passed it. Maybe a quarter mile.”

“Keep your speed up. Don’t stop. Don’t look it in the eye.”

“I’m not stopping, already. What the hell is it…”

“Mara.” He voice dropped into something lower, steadier. The kind of voice that was made for that moment, when that somebody needed someone to hold onto.

“I want you to focus on the road. I’m already moving. How far are you from the Route 9 junction?”

I looked up. The junction sign was right there. ahead.

“Maybe half a mile.”

“Pull over at the junction. At the junction not before. The open ground matters. Do you get it?”

Yes.” The sign was near. There was no more rustling in the trees. I understood immediately with the cold shiver of something traveling down my back, not because it had lagged behind. Because the trees were gone. Open farmland on left now, and whatever had been using the treeline as cover had simply…

Stopped.

Or was somewhere I couldn’t see it from.

I turned on to the gravel at the intersection with hands that were barely steady enough, I shifted into park and stayed there with the motor running and my phone to my ear and my chest conducting what may have been best described as an insurrection.

“I’m at the junction,” I said.

“I see your car.”

I looked up.

A black truck was already pulling off the road behind me.. moving fast, dust rising from the gravel, settling within range where I could make him out through the windshield, before I’d even come to a stop.

He got out before the engine fully died.

Same jacket. Same jaw. Daylight didn’t make him less unsettling… it just gave me more detail to be unsettled by. He was at my window in four strides, and when I rolled it down he braced one hand on the roof of my car and looked at me with those pale grey eyes doing a rapid, systematic check — face, hands, the treeline behind me, the way someone looked when they were assessing damage.

You’re okay,” he said. Like he was telling it to himself more than he was telling me.

“I told you I was fine.”

“You called me.”

I opened my mouth. Closed it.

A muscle moved in his jaw almost “almost” like he was suppressing something that wanted to be a smile.

“What was it?” I asked instead.

His eyes went to the treeline. What glimpses of his face were visible a moment ago soon shut tight as if shutters were being drawn across a window. Whatever he was.. whatever this world he moved through was.. it lived in that expression. The way he stared at those trees and something welling up behind his eyes moved from man to something older.

“I don’t know yet,” he said.

“That’s the second time you’ve told me that.”

He looked back at me then. The shutters didn’t fully open but something slipped out through the edge of them.

“I know,” he said. “I don’t make a habit of it.”

I held that to be true without question. I also believed, as I sat inside my car in the early morning light with that implausible stranger pressed to the outside of the glass at the road junction at 7:45am as if he’d moved a million things around in his morning to be with me, that I was already in a place I didn’t have a map for.

I had spent three years being careful. Three years basing all of my decisions on what was practical and responsible, and the particular kind of wisdom acquired through being burned bad enough and enough times to truly understand the shape of fire.

And I was sitting here thinking: This is the most terrifying person I’ve ever met, and yet beneath the practical fear and all the irrational panic… things were “safe.”

“Safe.”

That was scarier for me than whatever was out there in the trees.

“I have to get to work,” I said.

He gave one nod. He backed away from the window. But his gaze lingered on me with that same weight in the dark, “focused, intentional” look that doesn’t feel like you’re being watched but more like you’re being seen.

“I’ll follow you to the junction of Main,” he said. “After that, the road opens up.”

“You don’t have to…”

“I know.”

He was already heading back to his truck. I just sat for a moment, gazing down at my own hands on the steering wheel.

“Don’t,” I said to myself. “Don’t make it something that it’s not.” He’s a stranger who knows these roads. He’s being practical. This is not…”

I merged back onto Route 9.

In my rearview mirror, his headlights popped up instantly.

Steady. Unhurried. Not too far back — far enough to give me some breathing room but close enough that I could clamor up the trail if I had to. I kept my eyes on the headlights for two miles, and told myself a bunch of sensible, rational, constructed things.

I’m not sure I really believed any of them.

He peeled off at the Main Street junction without a word. No message. No signal. The black truck just turned south as I was driving east, and within half a minute it was invisible, and there I was in morning traffic on a road in front of the Calloway building with a cup of coffee rapidly cooling in my cupholder and feeling reminiscent of a person who had just gotten off a moving vehicle and was struggling to find his or her balance.

My phone buzzed.

“You’re going to want to know what’s in those woods”

I gazed at the message. “You are going to tell me.” I typed back.

Three dots. Then… “Tonight, if you’re willing.”

I stared at that for a long time. I wanted to vote “no.” Everything sane in my body lined up to vote "no."

But that was a different problem… something quieter, more wilful and utterly impervious to reasonable voting… was already decided.

“Where,” I sent back...

His answer was instantaneous, as if he had been aware of the answer already before I ever asked the question.

Like he had already known I would ask.