“Only good things.” Rebecca’s smile has edges. “He says you’re a vet.”
“Large and small animal.”
“We could use one of those around here. The nearest practice is forty minutes away, and the Bradfords were practically retired for the last few years before they left.” She tips her wine glass towards me. “You’ll be busy.”
There’s something about her that reminds me of a headmistress I had at school. A woman who could hold a room with nothing more than posture and the quiet certainty that she was the most competent person in it. Rebecca carries that same authority, understated but unmistakable, and the people around the fire defer to her in small, unconscious ways. They make space when she moves. They lower their voices when she’s speaking. Even Roan, who defers to nobody as far as I can tell, positions himself slightly behind her left shoulder when they’re standing together, as if the arrangement is habitual.
I file this away without knowing what to do with it.
The bonfire is bigger than I expected. The field behind the Hare and Hound slopes gentlytowards the treeline, and the fire sits at the centre of it, built with an attention that suggests someone takes this seriously. Chairs and blankets ring the perimeter. A folding table holds an assortment of food and drink that ranges from shop-bought crisps to what looks like homemade venison stew in a slow cooker.
There are maybe twenty people here. Roan introduces me to a few of them: Tom, who greets me with the easy manner of a man who likes everyone and insists I try Lucy’s flapjacks; a younger woman called Ellie who works at the post office and talks at a speed that suggests caffeine is her primary food group; and an older man called Arthur who looks at me with an expression somewhere between curiosity and recognition.
“Don’t worry about the staring,” Roan says quietly as we move on. “Arthur does it to everyone.”
I’m not entirely sure that’s true, but I let it go.
The evening settles into an easy rhythm. People eat, drink, talk in clusters that form and dissolve around the fire. Someone produces a guitar and plays badly enough that it’s charming rather than annoying. The air smells of woodsmoke and damp grass and something else, something underneath those familiar scents that I can’t identify. It’s earthy and rich, almost animal, and it coats the back of my throat. Not unpleasant. Distracting. I find myself hyper-aware ofthings I shouldn’t be able to detect. The conversation happening three groups away, about a planning application for a barn conversion, is as clear to me as if they were sitting at my elbow. The guitar player’s fingers on the strings produce a texture of sound I can almost feel against my skin. When the wind shifts and carries the scent of the forest towards us, I catch individual notes in it: wet bark, fungus, leaf mould, the musky trace of something alive moving through the undergrowth.
None of this is normal. I’ve been noticing it for days, this sharpening of my senses, but I’ve put it down to the move. Cleaner air. Less noise pollution. The adjustment from a city that overwhelmed the senses to a village that gave them room to breathe. It’s a reasonable explanation, and I’m committed to it.
But standing here, surrounded by these people, it’s harder to maintain. Everything feels turned up. The fire is too bright, the voices too textured, the smells too layered. My body is responding to stimuli I can’t consciously identify, and the result is a low buzz of alertness that I can’t switch off. But somewhere beneath the overwhelm, my body recognises this place as if it belongs to me.
“You all right?” Roan is beside me, his voice low enough that only I can hear it.
“Fine. Just taking it in.”
He watches me for a moment, and there’ssomething careful in his expression. More attentive than concern alone would explain. He’s looking at me the way I look at an animal in my surgery when I’m trying to identify symptoms without alarming the patient.
“Do you want to sit down? It can be a lot, meeting everyone at once.”
“I’m fine, really.” I take a sip of the wine someone pressed into my hand earlier. It’s good, rich and warm, and it takes the edge off the sensory overload. “Everyone’s been lovely.”
“They like you.”
“You sound surprised.”
“Not surprised. Relieved.” He says it lightly, but I don’t think he’s joking.
Rebecca appears at the fire with a fresh bottle of wine and refills my glass without asking, which I appreciate. She stares into the flames with a sigh of contentment.
“So, Phoebe. What brought you to Mistwood specifically? Plenty of villages with surgeries attached.”
“I saw the cottage advertised online. It had the surgery extension, which is rare, and the price was...” I pause, because the truth is the price had been suspiciously low, and the estate agent had been suspiciously eager. “Reasonable.”
“Reasonable,” Rebecca repeats, and somethingpasses across her face that might be amusement. “Well. We’re glad you’re here.”
“Maggie said something similar. She wrote ‘you’re exactly where you’re supposed to be’ on a welcome card.”
Rebecca goes still for just a moment. Then she takes a sip of wine and says, very evenly, “Maggie has a way of knowing things.”
I wait for her to elaborate. She doesn’t. Instead she asks about my practice. We talk shop for a while. Easy. Pleasant. I don’t think about the odd stillness or the careful phrasing. Not much, anyway.
The evening deepens. The fire burns down to a core of orange embers, and someone adds more logs. People drift away in pairs and small groups, calling goodnight across the field. The ones who remain draw closer to the warmth, and I find myself part of an inner circle I didn’t consciously join.
There’s a quality to this group that I can’t quite name. They move around each other with an ease that goes beyond friendship. It’s physical, instinctive, the spatial awareness you see in animals that live in close social groups. They don’t bump into each other. They don’t crowd. They arrange themselves in patterns that feel deliberate without being choreographed, and the result is a sense of cohesion so strong it’s almost visible.
It makes me feel two things simultaneously: welcomed, and outside.
