16. Rowan
ROWAN
WELCOME TO MY HOME, PLEASE STOP SMELLING ME
I walk with a heavy step, the leather-bound journal tucked under my arm like a piece of history I haven’t quite earned.
Wren follows me, her breathing audible as we climb the ridge toward the hollow where the old growth turns into something older.
She’s wearing her father’s boots again—I wonder when she’ll get her own—and the rhythm of her stride has changed.
She’s negotiating with the terrain instead of fighting it.
We reach the limestone lip that marks the edge of my home’s concealment.
The air here is denser, tasting of cedar and the sharp, clean bite of cold spring water.
Most humans hit this wall and feel a sudden, inexplicable urge to be anywhere else.
They remember a stove left on or a meeting they’re late for, then turn around without ever knowing they were looking at a door.
Wren doesn’t turn. She stops at the edge, her head tilted, sensing the shift.
She looks at me, a question in her eyes that I answer by gesturing for her to keep moving.
I built this place three generations before her grandfather was born, stone by heavy stone, and for the first time in a century, I am bringing a Cassidy inside.
We reach the massive slab of granite that serves as my front step.
It’s nearly three feet high, a scale meant for my legs in my natural form, not hers.
She eyes it with the weary resignation of a woman who has spent the last hour fighting gravity.
I step behind her, hook my hands under her arms, and lift her.
She doesn’t gasp or stiffen like she did when I lifted her over the fallen Douglas Fir.
There’s no lecture about nonconsensual lifting this time.
She just puts her hands on my forearms for balance as I set her down on the porch.
The ease with which she accepts me being a creature of impossible strength hits me hard.
Wren is getting used to me. It’s a dangerous kind of comfort.
I pull the door open. The hinges are silent, oiled with bear fat, and the handle is a curved branch of ironwood polished smooth by decades of use.
It’s positioned five feet off the ground.
Wren stares at it, her gaze traveling up to where the latch sits level with her forehead.
She looks like a child standing at the gate of a cathedral.
“Is this a house or a climbable monument?” she asks, her voice echoing in the high entryway. She steps inside, and the scale of the room swallows her. The ceiling is fourteen feet high, supported by peeled cedar trunks that still smell of the sap they carried when the world was younger.
She walks toward the center of the room, her boots thudding on the slate floor. I watch her reach for the back of one of my dining chairs. It’s massive, carved from a single stump of black walnut. The seat comes up to her waist. She puts a hand on it, testing the weight, then shoots me a dry look.
“Do you have a step-stool, or am I expected to vault for my dinner?”
“I have a smaller chair in the corner,” I say, pointing toward the hearth. “Left over from when Florence used to visit. She insisted on sitting at the table, not on it.”
Wren moves toward the fireplace, where a table built for her size sits tucked near the bookshelves.
She looks at the stacks of paper, the solar-powered lamps, and the small, battery-operated radio sitting on the mantle.
She traces the edge of a porcelain mug—one that looks distinctly modern—then turns to me, her brow furrowed.
“You have plumbing,” she says, gesturing toward the kitchen area where a copper pump sits over a deep stone sink. “And coffee. And... are those cargo pants?”
“I have a bank account, Wren. And a delivery address in town that Walt checks once a month.” I move toward the stove, a heavy iron beast that provides the only heat the house needs.
“The arrangement with your family wasn’t just about hiding in the woods.
It was about existing on the edges. Your mother handled the taxes.
Your father made sure the deed stayed in a name the county wouldn’t question. ”
I reach into the cupboard, pulling out a bag of beans I bought under the alias of a reclusive honey farmer.
I don’t tell her that I kept the plumbing working because Florence liked to wash her face with warm water.
I don’t tell her that the cargo pants are a concession to the fact that humans find nakedness more frightening than a seven-foot-tall man. I just start the coffee.
“Habit,” I add, my voice low. “It’s a quiet way to remember people who aren’t here anymore. The phone is in the desk. It’s for emergencies. I haven’t used it in twenty years.”
“They never told me about this,” Wren says as she sits in the smaller chair, her fingers tapping a rhythm on the wood.
She looks around the room, taking in the shelves of books, the dried herbs hanging from the rafters, and the general air of a life lived in a very long, very deliberate silence.
She looks smaller here than she does at the lodge.
More fragile, somehow, among the giant’s furniture.
“How has nobody found this?” she asks. “Everyone is crawling all over the North Ridge with thermal cameras. They should have stumbled onto this porch by now.”
“I told you before. I influence how they see. Or rather, how they don’t.
” I pour the water over the grounds, the scent of dark roast filling the room.
“They feel a need to turn left when they should go right. They see a wall of brambles where there is a path. For centuries, it was enough. The forest is vast, and humans are easily distracted by their own thoughts.”
I carry a mug over to her, the stone heavy in my hand. I have to lean down significantly to place it on her table. She takes it, the warmth of the steam hitting her face, but she doesn’t drink. She’s looking at me with an intensity that makes the back of my neck prickle.
“But it isn’t holding as well lately, is it?” she asks. “The volume. The drones. You’re tired, Rowan.”
“It’s more effort than it used to be,” I admit.
I don’t say that the hotline has made the mountain feel like a crowded room.
I don’t have to because her face tells me she knows.
“There are more eyes now. More cameras that don’t have minds I can nudge.
I can hide from a man. It’s harder to hide from a lens that doesn’t care about the feeling of being watched. ”
We sit in silence for a while, the only sound the crackle of the fire and the distant sigh of the wind in the chimney.
It’s comfortable, the kind of stillness I usually only find when I’m alone with the bees.
But having her here changes the texture of it.
The house feels less like a fortress and more like a home.
It’s a subtle shift, and I’m not entirely sure I like it.
Later, as we walk back toward the trail that leads to the lodge, I see it. Another boot print. It’s deep in the soft loam near the creek, a clear lug-soled mark that doesn’t belong to a Cassidy or a Halloran. It’s less than fifty yards from my door.
I stop, my shadow falling over the print.
I don’t point it out. I don’t want to see the worry in her eyes, and I don’t want to acknowledge that my walls are thinning.
I just step over it, my large foot obscuring the evidence of the intrusion, crushing the mark back into the earth. It feels like an omen.
“Rowan?” Wren asks, stopping a few paces ahead. She looks back at me, the light filtering through the canopy catching the copper glint in her hair. “What is it?”
“Nothing,” I say, the lie tasting like ash. “The ground is soft. Watch your step.”
We reach a fallen log where the path widens and the forest opens up to a view of the valley below.
The lodge is visible in the distance, a gray speck against the green.
Wren leans against the log, her expression shifting from the wonder of the house to something more somber. She looks at the lodge, then at me.
“Why didn’t you help sooner?” she asks. The question is quiet, stripped of her usual banter.
“You’ve been here. You’ve watched them. You clearly love this land.
You’ve been selling honey at the market all these years—I saw the records.
Why did you stay in the trees while the lodge was dying? Why let it get this bad?”
I look out over the valley, my hands resting on my knees.
It’s a question I’ve asked myself in the dark hours of the winter, but hearing it from her makes it feel like an accusation.
I think of her father, a man who walked these trails with a heavy heart and a mind full of debt, and I feel the weight of my own silence.
“The arrangement runs on being sought, Wren. Not imposed.” I look at my hands, the skin like old parchment.
“Your great-great-grandmother reached out. She shouted at the trees until the trees answered. She made the deal when I saved her children. But the Cassidys stopped reaching out two generations ago. Your grandfather treated me like a ghost story. Your father... he knew, but he was afraid. He respected the distance because he didn’t know how to bridge it. ”
I look at her, making sure she sees the truth in my eyes.
“I do not intrude on a family that hasn’t invited me in.
I watched the lodge struggle. I watched the paint peel and the roof sag.
But crossing that line uninvited... that was never the agreement.
So, they kept the records, made sure the taxes were filed and the deed to my home was mine, because those requests were passed from Cassidy to Cassidy, and I kept the perimeter.
Nothing more. I am a Guardian of the territory, not a manager of your debts.
Until you came up that ridge and I demanded you turn off the hotline, you were a stranger to me. ”