Chapter One
Alice
Theproblemwithwritingstories about the woods is that you start to believe you’re a woodland fairy or something. Like I’m right at home in the middle of the forest.
I've spent the past year drawing trees. Sketching ferns, inventing personalities for woodland creatures who speak in full sentences and learn tidy lessons by the final page. In my children’s book, the forest is charming and slightly mischievous. It is never inconvenient. It doesn't drop fifteen degrees the second the sun goes behind a ridge. It certainly doesn't dissolve your sense of direction while you're busy thinking about plot structure.
I’m so not a woodland fairy…
I shift my pack higher on my shoulders and study the trail where it forks ahead of me. One path curves uphill into thicker pines. The other slopes away into shadow.
I don't remember a fork.
I have been walking this loop for two hours and I have a clear mental picture of the mushroom cluster near the split stump, the place where the ridge opened up and I stopped to sketch the horizon. I do not have a mental picture ofthis.
The light is wrong, too. It was warm and gold an hour ago, filtering down through the canopy in a way that made everything look softer at the edges. Now it has gone thin and directional, the kind of late-afternoon light that is both beautiful and ominous… because it means the sun is already dropping behind the mountains.
I check my phone. No service, which I expected. What I didn't expect is the time. 6:47 p.m.Where did the day go?
It’s an occupational hazard, getting lost in my own imagination and losing track of the time. In the comfort of my office or my own backyard, that’s not a big deal.
In the middle of the woods, it might be.
"It's fine," I tell myself. I’ll just head back now. I’ll be back in my rental cabin and drinking hot chocolate in no time.
I pick the downhill path because it feels right, and I walk with deliberate confidence, paying attention to my footing on the roots that cross the trail like raised scars.
This is a marked path near a national park entrance. Rangers patrol these trails. They put up markers regularly. I should see one any minute to guide the way…
Any minute now.
But a marker never comes.
After ten more minutes, I must conclude the obvious: I’m lost.
The underbrush has thickened. The slope has steepened. The trail itself seems narrower, less certain of its own direction. When I stop and turn in a slow circle, nothing behind me looks like anything I remember walking through.
The temperature has dropped again while I was busy feigning confidence while marching in the wrong direction. I flex my fingers and feel the stiffness in them.
As a children's book author and illustrator, I came to the Smoky Mountains to finish a manuscript about a young fox who insists he prefers being alone. My editor has been unsatisfied with the ending and wants me to focus on what the fox learns by the end of the book. I have been struggling with that question for three weeks, which is why I booked a rental cabin and told myself the mountains would shake something loose.
I’m still not sure what the fox learns, but I’ve learned my lesson not to go wandering into the woods alone.
I look up through the branches. The sky has deepened to indigo, and the first star is out, startlingly bright and steady. More appear as the minutes pass, one by one, as if someone is switching them on.
I have not seen a sky like this in years. Even in the middle of being genuinely worried, I stand there for a moment and just look.
Then the cold settles another degree deeper, and I snap back to reality. I’m lost… and night has fallen.
If I keep walking without knowing where I am, I could make this worse. If I stay still, the cold will find the gaps in my jacket. Neither option is good. I breathe slowly and try to quiet the part of my brain that writes for a living, the part that is already constructing outcomes, most of which involve hypothermia and a very embarrassing search-and-rescue report.
"Get it together,” I murmur. “You are not a cautionary tale.”
But I'm also not sure which direction leads back to the main trail, and I am standing in the woods in October with cold fingers and a sketchbook I have been drawing in all afternoon instead of watching where I was going.
The forest settles around me as the last of the light drains out of it. Shapes blur. Shadows spread until they fill the space between the trunks. Above me, the stars burn brighter.
I hug my arms around myself and choke back a sob.
