I belong here.The thought arrives unbidden and with a conviction that startles me. I don’t mean the bonfire, or the village, or even the cluster of warm, easy people around the fire. I mean something more specific and less rational. Something in my body is responding to this group with a recognition my mind can’t account for.
I push the thought away because it doesn’t make sense, and I’m tired of things not making sense.
Roan walks me home when the fire has burned low, and the field has emptied to a handful of diehards. The lane is dark and quiet, the sky above us thick with stars that London never let me see. Our footsteps fall into the same rhythm without either of us adjusting.
“Did you have a good time?” he asks.
“I did. Your friends are...” I search for the right word. “Close.”
“They are.”
“Some of them seemed to know who I was before you introduced me.”
“Small village. Word travels.”
“That’s not what I mean.” I stop walking, and he stops with me. We’re at the turning to Ivy Cottage, the same spot where he left me after the café, and the laneis quiet enough that I can hear the faint hiss of the last embers in the field behind us. “They looked at me like they were expecting me. Tom, Rebecca, Arthur. They weren’t surprised I was there. They were... checking.”
Roan is very still. The starlight catches his eyes. For a moment they look almost golden. Something tugs at the back of my memory. Insistent. Shapeless. Refusing to resolve into anything I can name.
“People are curious about newcomers,” he says. “That’s all.”
“You do this every time.” I say it quietly, not as an accusation. An observation. “I ask you a real question and you give me a surface answer and change the subject or leave. The wolves, your family, your work, why half the village treats you like minor royalty. Every time I get close to something, you step back.”
He doesn’t deny it. He stands there in the dark with his hands in his pockets, and in the silence I can hear his breathing change. Not faster. Deeper. As if he’s holding something down.
“I know,” he says. Just that. No excuse, no deflection, no charming redirect. Two words that land heavier than any explanation could.
It’s not enough. But it’s honest, and after weeks of smooth surfaces, honest is something.
The night is cold. The wine has made me warm,tired. I don’t have the energy to pull at a thread that might unravel more than I’m ready for.
“Goodnight, Roan.”
“Goodnight, Phoebe.” He pauses. “I’m glad you came.”
I let myself into the cottage and close the door and stand in the dark hallway for a moment, listening to his footsteps retreat down the lane.
Then I go to the kitchen, sit at the table, and try to write down what I observed tonight, because that’s what I do. I document. I categorise.
Group of approximately 20. Unusually high average body temperature (noted in handshakes). Strong social cohesion with apparent hierarchy. Heightened personal awareness of ambient sound, scent, and spatial arrangement. Cause unknown. Correlation with relocation or environmental factors?
I stare at what I’ve written. Clinical, precise, and completely inadequate.
I don’t write down the part about belonging. I don’t write down that for two hours, sitting by a fire with strangers, my body felt more at home than it has in years. I don’t write down that when Roan stood beside me, close enough that his arm almost touched mine, every restless, anxious part of me went quiet, and the silence felt like an answer to a question I haven’t learned how to ask.
Closing the book, I go to bed. I dream about running through a forest in the dark, fleet and sure-footed, with something golden-eyed keeping pace beside me.
Chapter 13
The Hedge Witch
Roan
My phone hasseven notifications by the time I wake on Sunday morning. Two voicemails from my father about the patrol rotation. A text from Rebecca that simply says: “Who is she?” Three messages in the pack group chat about last night’s bonfire, none of which I read. And a photo from Tom of the fire’s remains with the captionSomeone left a chair. Claim it, or it becomes firewood.
I ignore all of them.
This is what I do. This is what I’ve always done. The pack reaches for me, and I step sideways, let the hand close on empty air, carry on as if the expectation was never there. It used to feel like freedom. Thismorning, it feels like something closer to cowardice, and I don’t like the distinction.
