2. Birdie
BIRDIE
If you've ever tried to hang a painting with witch's tape, you'll know it's less an adhesive than a tiny, opinionated life form.
It uncurls itself the moment you turn your back and occasionally hums show tunes under its breath.
I've spent the better part of the afternoon wrestling a single strip onto the wall of my new cottage, and it's beginning to feel personal.
It's a new wall. That's the disorienting part—not the packing, not the running, not the sleeping in three different places over the last two weeks. The wall. Mine.
For twenty-three years, every surface I've decorated belonged to someone else. My parents. My aunt. The Brookses. Leland, briefly. It always felt harmless, the way you draw in washable marker on a rental. But this is my wall.
Dandelion—Dandy to everyone who hates syllables—calls my current residence the Button Cottage.
The name owes less to its appearance than to the fact the address is impossible to find unless you're, quote, "one of those annoyingly tenacious Girl Scout types.
" Dandy collects phrases the way other people collect antiques and drops them everywhere like pollen until everything grows just a little weirder.
I am not a Girl Scout.
I can barely thread a needle.
But I can run.
And, as of last week, I am excellent at disappearing.
A sharp knock echoes through the cottage, and I flinch so hard the tape springs free, fluttering uselessly to the floor.
Standard protocol says I should hide under the kitchen table.
Dandy insists I stop being, in her words, "so stuck in survival mode that you miss your whole cute little story arc."
I peer through the peephole—which is actually the bottom of a glass Pepsi bottle Dandy embedded in the front door—and find a mop of pink curls waiting on the other side.
Dandy.
Her eyes are the color of antifreeze, and her entire body language suggests an unattended helium balloon.
"Locked?" she shouts through the door.
I fumble the deadbolt open.
"I brought donuts," she announces, sweeping inside. "And also a violin case full of anti-scrying salt. The donuts are the priority, but I feel like the two complement each other."
Whenever Dandy arrives, she brings a cloud of glamour with her. It settles over the room so thoroughly that all my anxieties about being found temporarily go dormant, replaced instead with questions like how she got here so quickly and why she smells faintly of marshmallows.
She kicks off her shoes, skips over the maze of unpacked boxes, and performs a delighted pirouette.
"It's so cute in here."
This is categorically false.
Ninety percent of the Button Cottage consists of one room.
The remaining ten percent is the bathroom and a deeply suspicious crawlspace above the kitchen that I haven't dared investigate.
There's exposed brick, a claw-foot tub, a fireplace blackened by generations of questionable magical experiments, and a bed I liberated from a barn with the owner's enthusiastic permission.
Thank you, Farmer Lovegood.
"You are flourishing," Dandy declares, surveying my decorating attempts.
Botanical prints, all thrifted.
Six succulents, all probably doomed.
A string of velvet pumpkins draped over the window.
"If this place had a Pinterest username," she says, "it would be BlessedHarvests—but, like, ironically." She tilts her head. "Are those curtains made out of pages from The Economist?"
"It was that or Interior Design for Dummies. I wanted to project detached sophistication."
"The hands of capitalism are definitely reaching down and tickling your windowsill."
She nods approvingly.
"Do you want to see what I brought?"
She's already opening the violin case before I answer.
"Is it a real violin," I ask, "or a weaponized violin?"
"Yes."
She triumphantly produces three tiny labeled vials tied together with garden twine.
"For you, madam. Salt harvested from the low marshes at moonrise. Enough to keep your location hidden from every ordinary human tracker."
She pauses thoughtfully.
"Unless someone is extremely determined. In which case, you'll hear them before they arrive because their shoes will fill with metaphorical fire ants."
"Is that the technical term?"
"I could make them literal," she says. "Usually feels like overkill."
She glances toward the little stack of unopened mail.
"Have you checked your letters?"
Twenty milliseconds of panic bloom before common sense catches up. No one here has my address.
Today's lone envelope bears the familiar sticker from the Coven of Respectful Correspondence, Dandy's preferred method of sending me horoscopes and coupons for the produce stand.
She catches my expression and waves her donut dismissively.
"No one's coming for you."
Coming from her, I believe it.
We eat donuts in silence, which is the only proper way to eat donuts.
I choose a plain glazed.
Dandy selects the one covered in disco dust.
Her tongue is iridescent after one bite.
"So," she says eventually, "how does it feel to be a genuine missing person?"
I'd like to say liberating.
Instead, it feels like waking at three in the morning convinced someone is outside the window and sleeping with a kitchen knife beneath my pillow.
"If I see one more headline about what a tragic, beautiful, fragile waif I was," I say, "I'm throwing my phone into the bay."
"They'll welcome it with parades," Dandy assures me. "An entire flotilla of mermen holding signs that say We Do Not Miss You, Leland."
I laugh so hard I inhale donut crumbs.
Her smile softens.
"You know," she says quietly, "you can stay with me as long as you want."
I shake my head.
"I have to try somewhere."
A beat.
"I hope it's here."
She nods, accepting that answer, then begins carefully measuring salt around the cottage. Tiny runes appear beneath her fingertips as she murmurs spells that sound suspiciously like inside jokes.
I love that about her.
All her magic is built on the scaffolding of affection and absurdity.
"Can I help?"
"You're already helping."
She smiles.
"But could you grab the cinnamon from the cupboard? Left side. Behind the ancient beans."
The next half hour becomes a scavenger hunt.
A second spoon.
A clean mug.
A pen.
Another candle.
More cinnamon.
By sunset the cottage is ringed with salt, tiny runes, and the unmistakable feeling that someone loves me enough to protect me.
Dandy plants her hands on her hips.
"There."
She sounds satisfied.
"If an average person comes looking for you, they'll forget why they came before they reach the porch. The only people who can find you now are the ones you want to see."
I believe her.
"You'll still get your mail," she adds. "I know how you feel about catalogues."
Darkness settles over the forest before she finally gathers her things.
At the door she hesitates.
"Are you going to be okay?"
The old answer rises automatically.
I'll be fine.
I always am.
Instead I try honesty.
"I don't know."
I swallow.
"But I really want to be."
She hugs me hard enough to wrestle bears before disappearing into the growing dusk, fireflies drifting after her like tiny lanterns.
I make myself a mug of instant decaf because I enjoy living dangerously and settle cross-legged onto the rug.
For a long time, I simply listen.
The forest has sounds I'm still learning to name.
Wind rattling the eaves.
Overcaffeinated squirrels tap-dancing across the tin roof.
Something distant and melodic that might be a wind chime.
Or the world's most offbeat cult rehearsing choir practice.
For six days I've lived beneath the crushing weight of panic.
Now, wrapped inside Dandy's wards, I feel it slowly receding, like a tide finally deciding to go home.
The cottage settles around me.
Quiet.
Patient.
Mine.
The crooked painting still hangs exactly where I left it.
I stand and study it for a long moment.
For twenty-three years, I would've straightened it.
Adjusted it.
Asked someone else if it looked right.
Tonight...
I leave it exactly where it is.
Maybe home isn't the place where everything is perfect.
Maybe it's the first place you're finally allowed to leave something crooked.
I switch off the lamp.
Outside, the forest hums softly around the Button Cottage.
For the first time in a very long time...
Tomorrow feels like it belongs to me.