Chapter Three – Meryl
Meryl folded her arms, the notebook pressed against her chest, as she watched Spencer’s truck disappear down the gravel drive. She didn’t move until the red taillights vanished around the bend, swallowed by the thick pines crowding the narrow lane.
Then the silence rushed back in and made Pine Cottage feel twice as big.
The wind moved through the trees, making the branches sway against the darkening sky. Without Spencer’s solid presence beside her, the house loomed behind her, as if waiting.
Waiting for what, exactly?
Meryl turned to face it. The doorway gaped open, revealing the dim hallway beyond.
“Right,” she said aloud, her voice sounding thin in the empty air. “It’s just a house.”
But as she stepped back over the threshold, the floorboard creaked beneath her weight, and she froze. Spencer’s warning came back to her at once.
Test before you step.
The crawl space.
She moved more cautiously then, testing each board as she made her way down the hall. In the fading light, the dust sheets over the furniture looked oddly human, all sloped shoulders and bowed heads.
Meryl swallowed hard as a sudden sense of overwhelm rose up in her. This was too much. The sagging porch. The rotten boards. The water damage. The kitchen that needed so much work. All of it crowded in on her at once now that he was gone.
She hadn’t asked for this. Hadn’t wanted a broken-down cottage in the middle of nowhere. Hadn’t wanted the responsibility of old walls and hidden rot.
She leaned against the staircase banister, solid, Spencer had said, and let her head drop forward.
Just for a moment.
Just one moment of admitting how overwhelmed she felt.
“Oh, Hilda. I can’t do this,” she whispered.
The house gave a low creak somewhere above her, settling into itself.
For one horrible second, she thought she might cry. Her throat tightened, and her control slipped in a way she hated.
Hated because it made her feel powerless. She refused to give in to that.
One night, she told herself. She just had to get through one night. She did not need to solve the whole house problem tonight. She did not need to decide the rest of her life tonight. All she needed was somewhere safe to sleep, something to eat, and a plan for the morning.
That was all.
Meryl straightened, scrubbed under her eyes with the heel of her hand, and flipped open her notebook to a fresh page.
PRIORITIES
Safe sleeping space
Water
Light
Food
Bedding
There.
That already felt better.
Lists made things manageable. Lists gave shape to panic.
Lists turned too much into the next thing and the thing after that.
She had learned that early, watching her mother throw belongings into suitcases whenever they had to leave somewhere in a hurry.
If you could list what mattered, you would leave less behind when you moved on.
And moving was always the point. Look for the next thing. Never stagnate.
The upstairs, Spencer had said, was better than it had any right to be.
So she would start there.
She trudged back to the car and popped the trunk.
In the time it had taken her to have that small breakdown, night had started to draw in.
The sky had shifted from sunset gold to that deep blue just before true darkness, and the air had turned sharp against her exposed skin, that particular mountain chill that sneaks up on you even after a warm day.
She gathered what she needed first: her overnight bag, a flashlight, a camping stove, the cooler she had packed for the drive, and the carrier bag with bottled water, fruit, crackers, and the emergency supplies she kept in her car more out of habit than planning.
It took three trips.
By the third, the light had thinned to almost nothing, and the woods around Pine Cottage seemed to press closer.
Not threatening exactly. Just there. Full of things she could not see.
The silence was never really silent, she realized.
It held layers. Wind moving high in the pines.
Something rustling in the undergrowth. The far-off call of a bird she could not name.
She locked the car on instinct and stood for a second with her bag hanging from one shoulder and the cooler knocking against her leg.
Then she laughed once under her breath, shaky and tired.
What was she even doing?
“Surviving one night,” she muttered, and hauled everything inside.
She climbed the stairs carefully, testing each step exactly as Spencer had. The wood felt solid beneath her feet, the banister smooth under her palm despite the dust. At the top, she paused and let the beam of her flashlight sweep across the landing.
Two bedrooms. Bathroom. Faded wallpaper. Shadows in the corners. Stillness.
The larger bedroom had been Hilda’s, she was fairly sure.
The door creaked when she pushed it open. The iron bedframe stood against the wall, neatly made up beneath a yellowed dust sheet. A narrow wardrobe stood sentinel in one corner. A heavy wooden chest sat at the foot of the bed. Dust lay over everything in a patient, even layer.
“This’ll do,” Meryl murmured.
She set the flashlight on the windowsill, angling it up toward the ceiling so the room filled with a softer pool of light, and then she set about making the space usable.
She pulled the dust sheet back first, half expecting a musty smell to rise from the mattress.
But there was nothing except the dry scent of old linen.
The blanket underneath was faded, and the sheet had gone a little yellow with age, but they looked clean enough.
Or clean-ish, at least. Better than she had expected.
Then she kneeled at the chest at the foot of the bed and lifted the lid.
Inside were old blankets, folded sheets, and a quilt.
Meryl lifted the quilt out carefully and shook it open. The quilt itself was intact, faded blue and green squares stitched together in neat, even lines. Not fancy, but beautiful in a practical kind of way. Made to last.
As she spread it over the bed, her fingers caught on something sewn into one corner. A small tag. Hand-stitched initials.
H.A.
Hilda Aldwick.
Meryl sat back on her heels for a moment and traced the letters with her fingertip.
Her great-aunt had made this. Had chosen the fabric, stitched the seams, and quilted the layers together by hand. Had folded it and put it away in this room. Maybe had slept under it in winter, with the wind in the trees and frost at the windows and the whole mountain dark outside.
“I’m not staying,” Meryl said softly into the quiet room. “Not properly. This isn’t...”
She stopped.
Because she did not know how to finish that sentence.
This isn’t home.
This isn’t forever.
This isn’t mine.
All of them were true.
Weren’t they?
She smoothed the quilt into place with both hands. The room still smelled of dust and old wood and dry air, but something about it no longer felt quite so abandoned. As though the quilt had made the house less empty.
After that, she unpacked quickly and methodically.
Sleeping bag on top of the quilt. Wash bag in the bathroom.
Toothbrush and face wipes by the sink. Phone and charger on the bedside table, though she was not ready to trust the power, and there was barely any signal.
Water bottle within reach. Flashlight on the windowsill.
She tried the bathroom tap. The water spat and coughed, then ran cold and clearer than before. She splashed her face, shivering at the shock of it, and caught sight of herself in the mirror above the sink.
Dust on her cheek. Hair escaping its tie. Eyes tired and wider than usual.
“You look ridiculous,” she told her reflection.
Her reflection did not disagree.
Back in the bedroom, she sat on the edge of the bed and looked at the cooler. She was not hungry, exactly, but she knew better than to leave herself running on nerves alone.
So she opened the cooler and made herself a practical sort of dinner: a bread roll, cheese, an apple, and a packet of salted crisps.
Not glamorous, but food. She drank bottled water rather than think too hard about the pipes and ate sitting on the edge of the bed, the flashlight throwing a soft, uneven light across the room.
Halfway through the apple, she glanced toward the window.
The last of the light had drained from the sky. Beyond the glass, the dark had deepened to velvet blue, and above the black line of the trees, the first stars were beginning to appear.
She found herself standing before she had fully decided to.
More stars appeared as she watched, and then more again.
She had forgotten what a real night sky looked like.
Before she could talk herself out of it, she reached for the quilt, wrapped it around her shoulders, and headed back downstairs.
The stars were coming out properly by the time she stepped onto the porch and lowered herself onto the top safe step, wrapped in Hilda’s faded patchwork against the cold.
The air was chilly enough to bite now, but it was clean and alive, and after the stale house it felt good in her lungs.
For the first time since arriving, Meryl stopped trying to assess anything.
She just sat.
Above her, the sky had cleared completely.
What had begun as a handful of stars became dozens, then hundreds, hard bright points scattered across a darkness deeper than any city sky ever managed.
The mountains were only shapes now, darker than the dark behind them, and the trees stood around the clearing like watchful shadows.
A breeze stirred the quilt around her shoulders. It smelled faintly of cedar and lavender and the shut-away scent of old linen cupboards.
Meryl tucked it more firmly around herself and tipped her head back.
For a while, she simply watched.
At one point, she became aware of something out beyond the garden. Not a sound, exactly. More of a shift in the darkness, a sense of life pausing at the edge of the trees.
Meryl went still.
Her grip tightened on the quilt.
But the fear only flickered through her. She did not feel hunted or threatened. Only aware of the dark at the edge of the garden and of the life moving quietly through it.
The breeze lifted again.
Something moved in the undergrowth, then was gone.
A deer, she told herself. Or a fox. Or absolutely nothing worth being dramatic about.
Still, she found herself listening.
And then, just as strangely, she found herself relaxing.
Maybe it was the quilt. Maybe it was exhaustion. Maybe it was the lingering memory of Spencer’s calm certainty. But sitting there under Hilda’s stitches with the stars overhead and the dark trees standing watch, Meryl felt something she had not expected to feel in Bear Creek on her first night.
Safe.
Not safe in the sense that everything was fine. It wasn’t. The porch was a hazard. The kitchen was a disaster. The house needed more work than she had budgeted for, and probably more time than she wanted to give it.
But safe enough for one night.
She let out a long breath and looked back at the house. In the dark, it was only a shape, rough-edged and crooked against the sky. But it no longer looked quite so forlorn.
“Okay,” she whispered to the cottage, to Hilda, to herself. “Maybe we don’t panic.”
The words made her smile despite herself.
Maybe she did not have to love the process. Maybe she did not have to turn into one of those people who talked cheerfully about reclaimed tiles and period features and the joy of stripping wallpaper.
But perhaps she could try not to dread every inch of it.
Perhaps she could take it one room at a time. One list at a time. One day at a time.
That was manageable.
Eventually, the cold got through even the quilt, and she stood, carrying it carefully back inside. The house greeted her with its usual creaks and settling sighs, but they no longer bothered her.
Upstairs again, she remade the bed with the quilt beneath her sleeping bag and climbed in fully dressed except for her boots. The mattress was lumpy. The room was cold. The house muttered around her in wood and wind and old pipes.
But through the window, she could still see the stars.
Meryl lay on her back and looked at them until her eyes began to close.
It was only one night, she told herself.
Only one night, and then she could decide what happened next.
But as sleep finally pulled at her, with Pine Cottage breathing around her and the mountains standing dark beyond the glass, that thought no longer felt quite as certain as it had when she first arrived.