26. Wren
WREN
THE INTERNET NEVER FORGETS, UNFORTUNATELY
I don’t need to click play. I saw the thumbnails before Jax slammed his laptop shut to go find a signal booster.
I saw the frame where Rowan’s skin looks less like flesh and more like ancient hemlock.
I saw the way he moved—a blur of impossible speed that no human frame could sustain.
It wasn’t a grainy photo taken from a hundred yards away.
It was a portrait of a secret being torn open.
My phone vibrates on the desk, a jagged skitter against the wood.
The Bigfoot Hotline is no longer a trickle of bored millennials and Croc-theft reports.
It’s a physical weight. The notification light is a frantic, rhythmic red pulse.
Every news aggregate, every cryptid forum, every bored person with an internet connection is currently watching a man turn into a mountain.
I touch the screen, my fingertip resting over the digital ghost of Rowan’s face.
He’s probably already gone. I felt the shift in him when we stood together in the dark—a pulling away that had nothing to do with physical distance.
He saved a life, and in return, I handed him over to the vultures.
I didn’t mean to. I meant to save the lodge.
I meant to pay the electric bill. I meant to keep the lights on so I could see him clearly, but the lights I’ve turned on are too bright. They’re blinding.
A soft knock at the door makes me jump. My chair screeches against the floorboards, the sound echoing in the hollowed-out silence of the building.
I expect Sarah Vance with a contract or Jax with his camera.
I expect the world to come crashing through the heavy oak doors to demand their piece of the miracle.
Thankfully, it’s just Marge, holding a tray with a heavy ceramic bowl and a glass of milk. The smell of beef stew hits me, a sharp, grounding contrast to the smell of ozone and wet wool that’s been clinging to my lungs since the storm started.
“You haven’t eaten all day, Wren,” she says. She doesn’t ask if I’m okay or mention the footage as she clears a space on the desk, pushing aside a stack of overdue invoices to make room for the tray.
“I’m not hungry, Marge,” I say. The scent of the stew reminds me of a life that no longer exists.
“Eat it anyway,” Marge says, pulling up the guest chair. She sits down with the heavy, deliberate sigh of a woman who has seen three generations of Cassidys try to outrun their own shadows. “The internet can wait ten minutes for you to eat. It’s not going anywhere. That’s the trouble with it.”
I pick up the spoon because it’s impossible not to with Marge looking at me. The first bite is hot and salty, a reminder that my body is still a physical thing that requires maintenance, even when my brain is currently vibrating at the frequency of a server crash.
“He’s gone, isn’t he?” I ask, looking at the dark reflection in the window. “I saw him in the mudroom. He looked... he looked like he was already miles away.”
“He’s a Guardian, Wren,” she says quietly. “Their first instinct is to protect. Their second is to hide. You can’t blame a man for doing what he was built for, even if the world decided to put a spotlight on the hiding spot.”
“I did this. The hotline. The marketing. I turned a secret into a brand. I thought I was being clever. I thought I was saving us.”
I look at the photo of my father. He kept the secret his whole life. He walked those trails for decades and never once thought about how to monetize the silence. I came back with an art history degree and a desperate need to balance a ledger, and I sold the only thing that was never mine to sell.
“Your father would have been proud of the rescue, Wren,” Marge says.
She reaches across the desk and covers my hand with hers.
Her skin is rough, calloused from decades of kitchen work, and warm.
“The rest of it? The cameras and the shouting? That’s just another storm.
We’ve had bad winters before. We’ve had seasons where the rain didn’t stop for a month and the roof leaked in every room. We stayed. We fixed the roof.”
“This isn’t a leaky roof, Marge. This is the house burning down. Aethelgard just sent over a revised offer. It’s a buyout offer. The money… it’s enough to clear the debt, to ensure you and Walt have a pension. Hell, it’s enough to build another lodge.”
I pull a single sheet of paper from under the tray.
The numbers are long, followed by enough zeros to make my head swim.
It’s the financial lifeline I’ve been praying for.
It’s the answer to every late-night panic attack and every cold morning spent wondering if we’d have enough fuel for the generator.
“And what do they want for it?” Marge asks.
“They want Rowan,” I say. “They don’t use his name, of course.
They call it ‘exclusive access to the biological anomaly.’ They want to turn this forest into a closed set.
They want to hunt him with drones and thermal sensors until they have enough content for a ten-part series. They want to own the myth.”
The silence that follows is heavy because I’ve just told her the price of our survival is someone else’s soul.
I think about Rowan in his house, and the honey that smells like wildflowers.
I think about him wearing that ridiculous HIDE I know that once a symbol is out in the world, it belongs to everyone.
But Rowan doesn’t belong to everyone. He belongs to the mountain. And maybe, in some small, terrifying way, he belongs to me.
I put the pen down. I don’t sign the paper.
I don’t answer Sarah’s text. I just sit in the dark and watch the red notification light on the hotline phone pulse like a heartbeat—fast, frantic, and stubborn.
I don’t have a plan yet. I don’t have a way to fix centuries of silence being broken in three minutes of 4K video.
But I know one thing. I can curate a mystery. And if the world wants a monster, I’m going to give them something else entirely. I’m going to give them the truth, and then I’m going to make them wish they’d never looked for it.
The chair groans as I lean back. The storm is still screaming outside.
I look at the buyout offer one last time before sliding it into the bottom drawer of the desk, right next to my father’s old trail maps.
I’m not taking the money. Not yet. Because once you sell the mountain, there’s nowhere left to hide.
I stand up, my joints popping in the quiet room. The office feels too small, the air thick with the residue of my own indecision. I need to move. I need to find the one person who doesn’t want me to sell a piece of my soul or buy a piece of the forest. I need to find Rowan.
But the mudroom is empty. The sodden heap of his ‘Hide she’s giving me an order. The panic in my chest shifts into something else. Something colder. Something tactical.
I leave her in the kitchen and walk back to the office, my footsteps heavy on the hardwood.
I sit back down in the blue light and look at the footage again.
I watch the way the light hits Rowan’s skin, and the impossible grace of his movement.
It’s beautiful. It’s terrifying. And if I don’t find a way to bury it under a mountain of doubt, it will be the last thing the world ever sees of him.
I pull the drawer open and look at the buyout offer one last time.
The numbers are still there, a siren song of safety.
I could take it. I could take the money, move Marge and Walt to a house with a roof that doesn’t leak, and walk away from the mystery forever.
But then I think of the bees. I think of the way Rowan looks when he thinks no one is watching.
I think of the man who saved a stranger while knowing it would cost him his soul.
I’m not taking the money. I’m going to stay.
I’m going to fight the swarm with the only weapon I have: the truth, draped in enough lies to make it unrecognizable.
I lean forward, my fingers hovering over the keyboard.
The hotline is still screaming, but I’ve stopped listening.
I have work to do. I have a mystery to bury. And I have a guardian to bring home.