Silent Shadows (Strange Terrain #1)

Chapter 1

chapter

one

DAISY

Getting my organs rearranged by a tall, mysterious dude doesn’t sound like a bad way to go. Supersonically, of course. I sigh, my head falling to the side, as I read another firsthand account from a Bigfoot encounter.

“Yeah, girl, so that’s how my beef with Dickie Hanks blew up,” the overly twangy voice of the country star I’m virtually interviewing pulls me from my reading. I nod, pretending to have been listening.

“Got it. So would you say your sex tape with his ex-girlfriend had anything to do with it?” I ask, regaining control of the conversation for a moment as I click on another conspiracy article.

“Well, yeah, darlin’,” he continues, spinning a new, somehow longer, story, and I’ve already lost interest again.

As a sex and culture podcaster, interviews are part of the gig.

But lately, they’ve gotten impossibly boring.

I’ve been doing this for over a decade, starting right out of college.

The DL with Daisy was my way of coping with being a single twenty-something, and the podcast took off faster than I do after a bad date.

Now, I run a full-fledged production company with multiple product lines, over two dozen shows and counting, and a handful of hosts, all doing their thing under my pop culture umbrella.

It’s fun, it’s exhausting, and it’s getting old.

I’m staring at the wall zoning out when my producer, Marissa, starts waving her arms from the other side of the booth.

I look down at my screen and see the singer finishing his story.

Thank God she knew I wasn’t listening. She always knows.

I catch the tail end of his monologue, which closes on a delightful note about his new girlfriend’s huge tits.

I pretend to take notes while he talks, scribbling a skull on a scrap of paper.

I keep my dead-eyed smile fixed on the camera as I pass it to Marissa.

She rolls her eyes and makes the “cut” motion across her throat.

I reset my bright, polished smile, which I know comes through in my voice.

“Wow. Love that journey for you,” I say, injecting just enough amusement to keep it playful.

“But let’s take a quick pivot, because we love a little vulnerability here: what’s something people get totally wrong about you? ”

Marissa nods with approval and gives me a thumbs-up.

The singer pauses, thrown off. Good. That’s the trick. Disrupt the ego spiral.

“Uh,” he says, scratching his chin. “People think I’m, like, always on. But I’m chill. I like reading and stuff.”

Reading. Groundbreaking.

“Oh, slay! We love a literary king,” I say, disgusted by the chronically online phrases I never use outside of podcasting, already signaling off-camera to Marissa that we’re about to wrap. “Okay, last question. Favorite position? Sleeping, obviously.”

He laughs. “On my stomach.”

“Perfect. You heard it here first, folks. A stomach-sleeper who reads. It’s giving multifaceted.” I grin. “Period. That’s all the immaculate vibes for today. Stay hydrated and unproblematic, fam.”

I stop the recording and stretch my arms out, my back cracking in eight different places.

“Hey, thanks for doing this,” I say, my voice dropping to reveal my exhaustion, to the man wearing a cowboy hat on my screen. “Your publicist will get the edit for review first thing tomorrow.”

He takes off his hat and rakes a hand through his hair, saying without a hint of twang, “Thanks, Daisy! Always a pleasure.”

I smile and nod, then end the call.

“Jesus fucking Christ,” I mutter, ripping off my headphones as if they're personally responsible for my impending existential crisis.

Marissa bursts into the booth before I can even stand, her blonde waves bouncing as she moves. “You blacked out for, like, forty percent of that. At least.”

“I did not black out,” I argue weakly. “I was just multitasking.”

“You were reading about Bigfoot.”

I freeze.

She narrows her eyes, crossing her arms. “You had the article reflected in your glasses, Daisy.”

Damn it. I throw my blue light glasses down on the desk.

“Okay, first of all—” I stand, gesticulating like a defense attorney as if I didn’t get caught red-handed—“it was a compelling article. And second, I still landed the plane, didn’t I?”

“You crash-landed the plane, set it on fire, and then made a joke about the debris.”

“Which people love,” I point out. “My debris jokes test incredibly well with our audience.”

Marissa snorts. “Do you even hear yourself anymore? I swear, podcast Daisy talks like the try-hard cool mom in Mean Girls.”

I laugh. “Hey, we agreed back in college that podcast Daisy would be an alter ego, remember? And it’s tested well, right?”

Marissa winces. “Eh, the latest testing is in. It’s not great. It confirms your core audience is moving on to mommy podcasts or true crime. We built the playbook for this podcast genre, but the rules of the game are changing. We have to pivot and try something new.”

What she says isn’t news to me. I knew the podcast wasn’t as successful as it once was—the show’s subscriber count has stayed flat for the past two years, and its ad sales are trending down year over year.

I’ve been putting off dealing with it because I honestly don’t know what to do.

I grab my laptop off the desk and find myself back at the article I’d been reading.

Grainy photos. Anonymous quotes. A man named Gary who swore on his mother’s grave that something eight feet tall had screamed at him in the woods of Northern New Mexico, causing internal organ damage.

“Define new,” I say, only half-listening.

“I mean not… this.” She gestures vaguely around us—at the studio, the setup, me. “Same format. Same topics. Same recycled, basic sex questions. It’s safe. It’s polished. It’s—”

“Successful,” I cut in.

She pauses. “Yeah. It was successful.”

I look up, catching the way her expression softens just a little. That’s the problem with Marissa. She’s not just my producer. She’s my best friend. Which means she knows exactly when to push and when to pull back.

“I’m not saying you’re failing,” she continues, gentler now. “I’m saying you’re bored.”

I scoff. “I’m not bored.”

“You were literally researching Bigfoot mid-interview.”

“That doesn’t mean I’m bored. It means I have layers.”

She raises a brow. “You’re gonna call that layers?”

I shrug, trying to sound casual. “We all have our own hyperfixations, don’t we? It just fascinates me. People genuinely believe they’ve seen something. There’s an entire subculture around it.”

“The last thing you found fascinating was that Mormon cult leader who did parkour on the rocks in Utah, and it became your entire personality for weeks,” she points out. “Maybe it’s time to indulge that side of yourself a bit.”

I drop back into my chair, spinning slightly as I skim another article. This one’s a forum post. Long. Detailed. Too detailed to be entirely fake… right?

“I mean, listen to this,” I say, reading aloud. “Miles_StrangeTerrain says, ‘It wasn’t just the size. It was the feeling. Like being watched by something that knew you didn’t belong.’ That’s kind of deep. Or at least just good writing.”

“Or it’s a guy who failed creative writing in high school,” Marissa says dryly.

I shrug again. “I like it.”

She studies me for a second, then sighs and pulls up a chair across from me. “Okay. I’m going to say it again. You’re so mind-numbingly over this.”

“I’m not—”

“You are,” she cuts in. “And, D., it’s showing. No one new is subscribing because nothing new is happening.”

I lean back, folding my arms. “So what? Am I supposed to reinvent a decade-old brand overnight? I’m already bringing in these young girlie pops to host their own shows. They’re the future, right?”

“I mean, maybe,” she says. “But what about your future? What if we maybe… evolve it.”

I groan. “God, I hate that word.”

“I know. That’s why I used it.” She smiles sweetly. “Look, The DL with Daisy built your entire empire. But I think you’ve outgrown it, or at least this version of it.”

I glance around the studio, from the sleek equipment and glass walls to the neon sign bearing the show’s logo, glowing softly behind the desk. It’s all so… polished. Controlled. Predictable. Tired.

I can’t deny I’ve been wondering what’s next for me. I’m a podcaster known for sex and dating, and I’m still single, ten years later.

Dating, for me, has become less of a thrill and more of a pattern I can predict by the second drink.

There’s always a moment—usually somewhere between him telling me I’m “not like other girls” and asking what I’m looking for long-term—when I feel myself checking out.

Not physically. I’m still there, smiling and asking the right questions.

But internally, I’m narrating it like it’s content: and here we have a man in his natural habitat, mistaking surface-level chemistry for compatibility.

It’s not that I don’t want something real.

I do. But I don’t want something that sticks to a script.

And lately, that’s all it feels like—guys who’ve already decided who I am before I even open my mouth.

Case in point: my most recent ex. We made it almost a year, which in my world might as well be a common-law marriage.

He was kind and consistent, the kind of man people cite when they say, “See? Good ones exist.” Maybe he was a good one, just not for me.

Somewhere along the way, I realized he didn’t see me—he saw a version of me that fit neatly into his life.

Podcast host, sure. Funny, yes. Raunchy, yep.

But to him, my wildness was contained. Predictable.

Easy to introduce to his parents. He talked about the future as if it were already decided.

The more he leaned into those assumptions, the more I pulled back, like a rubber band stretched too tight.

So I ended it. Clean, quick, almost clinical.