I clucked my tongue and swiped to answer. “What?”
There was a pause, and in that instant, I pictured the exact expression on his face—annoyed, smug, already preparing some passive-aggressive remark about my tone.
“Sam.” The clipped efficiency of his voice made my eye twitch. “Finally. I’ve been trying to reach you. Look, I need you to weigh in on something—”
“Are you serious?” I snapped.
A pause. “Excuse me?”
I sat up, heat surging through me. I was in the middle of the goddamn woods. I was on vacation. And the man I— I stopped the thought before it could finish.Faelanwas being consumed by the land itself.
And my boss was calling not just me, but my friends, chasing me down to answer some asinine question about a project that, in the grand scheme of things, would mean absolutely nothing.
I didn’t even let him get another word in.
“I quit.”
Silence.
“…I’m sorry, what?”
“I. Quit,” I repeated, enunciating every syllable. “I should’ve done it a long time ago. You don’t actually care about the work—only the high you get from seeing how many hours you can get away with wringing out of the team.”
I heard him tale a breath like he was preparing to argue—to condescend, and likely claim I was being emotional.
So I didn’t give him the chance.
“You need to find someone else to call with your latest crisis, because it’s not gonna be me.”
Then I hung up.
Callie and Bethany stood in the doorway, drawn by the sound of my raised voice, watching me intently. But they didn’t interrupt.
I turned back to Faelan, hoping for something—a smirk, a knowing glance, some quiet confirmation that I’d finally made the right choice.
But his eyes were closed.
And the forest was still taking him.
Vines wove along his arms and curled into his hair, twining with the blossoms already rooted there. Their petals were lush, impossibly bright, shifting from white to deep gold to red, like the trees had decided to offer up their finest blooms just to crown him. The scent was thick, overwhelming, heady with life.
The hunting blind had become a shrine to something too alive to be a place of death anymore. The old chipboard was now living wood, and green swallowed everything. Fruits swelled on the vines, leaves stretched through the slats toward the sun, tendrils wound through the beams as if they were an arbor.
It was stunning.
So beautiful, I couldn’t help but wonder…what if I’d been selfishly fighting something that wasn’t meant to be stopped?
This was nature—the thing my green spaces purported to preserve.
Maybe Faelan had been right all along.
I let out a breath, steady this time, and let my hand brush one of the blossoms in his hair. It was soft, fresh, fully formed, like it had never known anything but bloom. This was beautiful. This was balance.
And then—
A single petal wilted.
It was so subtle, I thought maybe I’d imagined it. But no. The petal went translucent and thin, and ever so gently, began to collapse.
