Sabrina: Call me.
I stared at the messages for a long moment, feeling that familiar pressure building in my chest—the obligation, the guilt, the sense that I owed her something just because she’d been my agent for seven years.
Then, I did something I’d never done before: I turned my phone completely off.
Not silent. Not airplane mode. Off.
The music stopped, and the screen went dark. I felt a rush of something that might have been panic or might have been relief. I wasn’t sure which.
I was setting the phone down next to me when I heard it—a sound that was somewhere between a screech and a battle cry, high-pitched, furious, and absolutely terrifying.
I spun around just in time to see a blur of white fur launch itself from a tree branch about fifteen feet up. The cat—because it had to be the cat Gladys mentioned—hit the ground running,all four paws scrambling for purchase as it chased a squirrel across the deck at speeds that seemed physically impossible.
The squirrel, in a panic, rushed toward me.
The cat followed.
I yelped and jumped to the side, but the cat was faster. It streaked past my legs with inches to spare, still screeching like a demon, and the squirrel made a hard turn that sent it shooting up the nearest tree.
The cat hit the tree trunk with a thud that I felt in my bones, claws scrabbling at the bark, still making that unholy noise that echoed through the mountains like an air-raid siren.
The squirrel chittered from a high branch, clearly judging us both.
I stood frozen on my yoga mat, heart pounding, staring at this white ball of absolute chaos that had just scared approximately ten years off my life.
The cat stopped screeching and turned to look at me. It was enormous—or at least its fur made it look enormous, all fluffed up from the chase. Pure white except for the leaves and debris now stuck in its coat. And its eyes—one blue, one green—fixed on me with an intensity that suggested it was deciding whether I was prey or competition.
“Jesus Christ,” I said, still catching my breath. “What the hell is wrong with you?”
The cat sat down, wrapped its tail around its paws with feline dignity, and began grooming itself like nothing had happened.
Somewhere in the distance, I heard Gladys’s voice in my head: Don’t feed it.
I looked at the cat. The cat looked at me.
“I’m not feeding you,” I stated.
The cat blinked slowly, then returned to its grooming.
I gathered up my phone and yoga mat with shaking hands, checked the deck for any other wildlife that might want to give me a heart attack, and headed back inside.
I spent the next hour trying to convince myself that I knew what I was doing with the fire.
Gladys's instructions had seemed straightforward enough: "Keep it fed. Don't let it go out." But she hadn't mentioned what to do when the logs you were feeding it were apparently too wet to actually burn.
The fire had been roaring when I arrived, filling the cabin with warmth and that cozy crackling sound that made me feel like I was in a Hallmark movie. Now, two hours later, it had diminished to sad, sulking embers that looked about as enthusiastic about life as I felt about my career.
I grabbed another log from the stack Gladys's grandson had left on the porch—a generous pile that should have made me feel secure but instead just mocked my incompetence. The wood felt heavy, damp, like it had been sitting outside absorbing mountain moisture for weeks.
"It's fine," I told myself, carrying it inside. "Wood is wood. It'll dry out once it's in the fire."
Narrator voice:It did not dry out in the fire.
I placed the log carefully on top of the embers, just like the YouTube video had shown. Then I waited. The log sat there, wet and defiant, slowly suffocating what remained of my fire. A thin trail of smoke rose up, but no flames. No heat. Just the gradual death of my only heat source as the temperature outside dropped into what I was pretty sure was "hypothermia territory."
"Come on," I muttered, trying to rearrange the log. "Work with me here."
The log hissed at me.
