Chapter 10 #2
That afternoon, I’m on a house call to a farm on the edge of the village, a ewe with a limp that turns out to be an abscess, and Roan is in the neighbouring field helping repair a dry stone wall.
He raises a hand in greeting, and I raise one back, and I’m still thinking about the way his shirt pulled across his shoulders when he lifted the stones as I drive home.
Which is not a professional observation.
The day after that, I take an outside breather from the work to find Maggie in her front garden and Roan on a ladder propped against Maggie’s house, clearing leaves from the guttering.
Maggie waves me over with the cheerful authority of someone who considers a fence between properties a suggestion rather than a boundary.
“Roan’s been helping me with a few jobs,” she says, in a tone that implies she personally invented the concept of a man doing manual labour. “Isn’t that kind of him?”
Roan looks down from the ladder with an expression that manages to be both innocent and deeply amused. “Maggie’s gutters were blocked.”
“They’ve been blocked since September,” Maggie says. “But it’s nice to have someone tall around.”
There’s something in the way she says it, a brightness in her eyes that goes beyond matchmaking. Maggie is watching us the way you watch a recipe coming together, checking the ingredients, noting the timing. I’d find it intrusive if it weren’t so plainly well-intentioned.
Roan climbs down and brushes leaves from his jacket, and as he passes me to get to the wheelbarrow, his fingers brush against mine.
Knuckle to knuckle, brief and light and almost certainly accidental except that his hand lingers for a fraction of a second before pulling away.
The contact goes through me like current.
Not warmth this time. Sharper than that, more specific, landing low in my belly with a precision that makes my breath catch.
I close my hand into a fist at my side, not to keep from reaching after him but because my body is doing things I haven’t authorised and I need it to stop.
“Cup of tea?” Maggie offers, already moving towards her kitchen. “I’ve just made scones.”
“Roan,” I say, while Maggie is inside putting the kettle on and we’re standing by the wheelbarrow in a brief pocket of privacy. “This is the third day in a row I’ve run into you.”
“Small village.”
“The post office. The farm next to my house call. And now my neighbour’s gutters.” I fold my arms. “If I didn’t know better, I’d think you were following me.”
He has the grace to look caught, which is almost more unsettling than if he’d denied it. “Maggie’s gutters genuinely needed doing.”
“I’m sure they did. But you don’t strike me as a man who cleans gutters for the joy of it, and I don’t think the timing is a coincidence.” I hold his gaze. “What’s going on?”
For a moment, something crosses his face that I can’t read. Not guilt, exactly. Something heavier. He opens his mouth, and I think he’s going to tell me something real, something that explains the weight behind his eyes and the careful way he positions himself in every conversation.
Then Maggie’s back door opens and the moment is gone.
“Just being neighbourly,” he says, and the smile returns, easy and warm and absolutely impenetrable.
I let it go. But I don’t believe him.
We sit in Maggie’s kitchen, the three of us, eating scones that are somehow still warm and drinking tea from mismatched china cups.
Roan is relaxed here, more relaxed than I’ve seen him anywhere else, and Maggie treats him with an easy fondness that suggests a long history.
If my accusation bothered him, there’s no trace of it now.
They bicker gently about the state of her garden fence.
He promises to come back and fix it at the weekend.
It’s all so ordinary, so domestic, that I almost forget to be on guard.
Almost. But not quite. Because underneath the warmth and the easy conversation, I’m aware of something building between me and Roan that has nothing to do with warmth.
It’s tension. Physical, specific, the kind that makes me hyperaware of where his hands are and how far away his mouth is, even while I’m eating a scone and discussing fence posts with his neighbour.
I haven’t seen the wolf since that morning in the forest. I notice this the way you notice the absence of a sound you’d grown accustomed to, a background awareness that surfaces at odd moments.
Walking into the surgery in the early light.
Standing at the window between patients.
Lying in bed at night, listening to the silence where the howling used to be.
I don’t dwell on it. I have enough to occupy my thoughts without adding a missing animal to the list.
But it’s there. The absence. Quiet and persistent, like a question I haven’t thought to ask yet.
By the end of the week, I know the following things about Roan Mistwood: he takes his coffee black, he reads more than he lets on, he has a dry sense of humour that surfaces without warning, and he is hiding something.
I don’t know what. Nothing about him reads as dangerous.
He’s sharp, present and attentive without calculation.
But there are gaps. Subjects he steers around with the expertise of someone who’s been doing it his whole life.
His family, his work, the reason he finds Mistwood suffocating, but can’t seem to leave.
The way other people in the village treat him with something closer to deference than respect, as if he occupies a position he hasn’t told me about.
I should be more concerned about this than I am.
A man with secrets should be a red flag, not a puzzle I want to solve.
I asked him point blank if he was following me.
He smiled his way out of it. I let him. That bothers me more than the following.
But when he looks at me with those golden-brown eyes, the colour of them nagging at me the way a half-remembered word nags, almost there but never quite arriving, my concern dissolves into curiosity and my caution dissolves into something I don’t have a sensible name for, and I think: I’m in trouble.
The quiet, uncomplicated life I came to Mistwood for is getting more complicated by the day. And the worst part is, I don’t entirely mind.