Chapter 48 #3
“French became more common once traders began moving through the territory,” he continued. “English gradually replaced it.”
I glanced over briefly. “You really remember all of it?”
“Yes.”
The simplicity of the answer made the years inside him feel impossibly large for a second.
“Meanwhile I barely survived high school Spanish.”
“You understand enough to speak with Mrs. Alvarez.”
“That is not the same thing as mastering multiple languages.”
“It seems effective for your purposes.”
“That’s fair.”
The next song rolled in softly after that, “Stick Season” by Noah Kahan filling the SUV low enough that it blended naturally with the sound of tires against pavement.
Calder listened for a while before speaking again. “Humans organize territory differently now.”
“You mean cities?”
“Yes, and ownership.” His eyes followed the passing tree line thoughtfully. “The boundaries move constantly. Roads divide migration paths that once remained open for generations.”
The photographer part of my brain immediately pictured the layers over time.
Forests before highways.
Trails before fences.
Entire histories hidden underneath asphalt and subdivisions.
“You notice all of it, don’t you?” I asked quietly.
“I have had a long time to watch.”
There was no arrogance in the answer. If anything, it sounded lonely.
My fingers tightened slightly around the steering wheel.
I thought about Fen then.
About centuries.
Loss.
Memory.
Watching places change, watching people leave while you remained.
And suddenly, immortality felt much larger than living forever.
It meant carrying every version of your life with you long after the world moved on from it.
Calder glanced toward me again. “You are thinking too loudly.”
I snorted. “That’s not a real thing.”
“It is with you.”
Unfortunately, he was probably right.
The road narrowed gradually as we advanced down Bray Road, trees crowding close along both sides.
And suddenly the memory surfaced. Mrs. Alvarez warning me about the Beast, the dark stretch of road.
Something impossibly tall standing near the trees.
Eyes catching briefly in my headlights.
My grip shifted slightly on the wheel.
“… Hold on.”
Calder glanced toward me. “What?”
“That first night I drove out here, I thought I saw something near the woods.”
Calder went quiet beside me, and my stomach flipped.
“Wait.”
His gaze moved briefly toward the windshield again. “You saw me.”
I stared at him. “That was you?”
“Yes.”
The memory replayed instantly now that I knew–the height, the shape between the trees, the feeling that something was there even after I convinced myself I imagined it.
“Oh my God.”
Calder watched the road ahead calmly while my entire brain tried reorganizing itself around the fact that he’d seen me before we ever met.
“Why didn’t you tell me?”
That finally made him look at me directly. “You believed you imagined it.”
“Yeah, but—” I stopped because another realization slammed into me. “You remembered me that whole time.”
Calder was quiet for a moment. “Yes.”
There was no hesitation, no embarrassment—just truth.
And somehow, that affected me more than the reveal itself. “Why?”
The question came out softer than I intended.
Calder’s attention shifted briefly toward the passing trees before returning to me. “Because you kept looking.”
My chest pulled tight unexpectedly.
“Most people who glimpse something they do not understand convince themselves to stop thinking about it,” he muttered. “You tried to explain it away, but you continued looking for me anyway.”
Jesus Christ.
That was somehow worse… better—maybe both.
“So you remembered the weird guy aggressively checking his mirrors on Bray Road.”
A faint trace of amusement touched his mouth. “You looked concerned.”
“I thought I was about to die.”
“You continued driving toward my territory.”
“Okay, wow. That sounds terrible when you phrase it like that.”
A faint trace of amusement touched Calder’s mouth. “I remember wondering why I kept thinking about the human that I saw on Bray Road afterward,” he said.
My grip changed on the steering wheel. “Calder—”
“Now I understand why.” His voice stayed calm. Completely certain. “It was always you, my heart.”
For a second, the road, the trees, the fading afternoon light—everything narrowed down to the impossible man sitting beside me, saying devastating things like they were simple facts.
“You cannot say things like that while I’m driving,” I said, my voice thicker than I meant it to be, giving away the roiling emotions inside me.
“I am only telling the truth.”
Which would’ve been easier to survive if he sounded even slightly aware of what those words did to me, but Calder said things like that with complete sincerity.
Like loving me was no more complicated than naming the weather.
Like he still didn’t fully understand the effect he had on me.
Which somehow made it worse.
Better.
Both.
And somewhere between the trees lining Bray Road and the impossible man sitting beside me, I realized the moment I looked back into those woods, falling for him had become inevitable.