“Miora looked so tired,” I said. “I brought home birch, but she barely cared.”
“It will fix enough,” he said.
We went back in, and the cottage eased into the evening’s last ordinary rituals of cups of tea set down; chairs scolded for wobbly legs; doors encouraged to stop gossiping in the night. I tucked the birch more firmly into the blue bottle, and the sprig smelled like river again, stronger now that the house had accepted it.
I told myself I had done enough for one day. I told myself I could sleep. I told the little voice asking if Gideon’s yes would turn into a performance in five days to go dust something.
Then the cottage coughed.
Not the stove or the chimney.
The cottage. A cold breath slipped under the door like a letter passed during class. The lantern sputtered. The birch sprig shivered in its bottle, then stilled, leaf-edges rimed for a second with the faintest lace of frost.
Keegan’s head lifted. Miora’s eyes opened, quick and clear. My dad turned in the doorway, eyes gone dark in a way I knew too well. My mother’s hand tightened on the letter opener as if the paperwork might try to object. The bramble mule stopped chewing a dish towel it had stolen and froze, one petal ear cocked to the door.
On the floor, just over the threshold, lay a dusting of ice crystals so fine they made the moonlight pool like milk. In the center, delicate as an insult, someone had traced a sigil with a fingertip and then blown it away until only the ghost of the shape remained.
It wasn’t the priestess’s thorn circle. It wasn’t any mark I recognized.
Karvey’s voice came low as a stone turning over in sleep. “Something else has learned to write.”
Keegan stepped forward, but the cottage itself rumbled a warning, and the frost ghost of the sigil breathed once as if amused and then disappeared.
I met Keegan’s eyes and saw all my unease reflected back, his held in that careful place where he keeps worry from becoming prophecy.
“Shoes by the door,” Frank repeated softly.
“Shoes by the door,” I echoed, and felt the alder’s green, stubborn scent thread up into my ribs.
“Always ready,” my mom said softly.
We would sleep—with the light on, maybe. We would dream—with the window latched. We would practice refusing to be surprised. And in five days the circle would close, and somewhere between now and then, the thing that had traced aghost on my floor would decide whether it wanted to write again or knock.
The cottage held its breath with us.
My heartbeat and Keegan reached me first as his eyes swept the floorboards, then my face, and the way he looked at me made something inside my chest both unclench and clench again.
“You’re all right,” he murmured. A statement. A wish. A spell.
I nodded, and the nod felt small compared to the weight behind it.
My mother pressed her fingers to her mouth. Her eyes had gone glassy.
The divorce papers sat on the table like a stack of unwelcome prophecies, edges sharp, waiting to be addressed. She had held them together all day, and it struck me, suddenly and painfully, that she was grieving two different things at once: the man she once loved enough to marry and the mother she’d already lost long before today.
I wrapped an arm around her, pulling her into my side. The smell of her shampoo—a familiar apple-and-oregano combination she’d used my whole childhood—hit me like a soft punch. She tucked her forehead against my shoulder the way she did when she thought I was asleep as a kid.
“I’m okay,” she whispered, though the shake in her voice said she wasn’t, not really. “It’s just been… a lot.”
“It has,” I said. “And you don’t have to file or think or fix anything tonight. You get to just be tired.”
She let out a shaky laugh that turned wet. “When did you get so wise?”
“Just this morning,” I said. “Right before I nearly got stabbed by snow.”
That coaxed a real laugh out of her…a startled, hiccupping one that made the bramble mule flick his ears proudly, as if he’d personally helped.
Across the room, my dad watched us quietly.
