“I walked. I felt. I cross-referenced with geological survey data.” I pull the map from my bag and spread it on the kitchen table. “Look. The forest clearing where the bonfire was held. Geoff’s lower field. The spot behind the church. The café. All on the water.”
He leans over the map. Studies it. I watch his face for the thing I’ve learned to look for: the slight tightening around his eyes that means I’ve found something he already knew but didn’t expect me to find.
There it is.
“You knew,” I say.
“I knew some of it.The clearing, the farm. My mother mentioned them once. She said certain places in Mistwood were louder than others.”
“Louder how?”
“She didn’t explain. I was eight. She was telling me a bedtime story, and I thought she was making it up.” He straightens. Turns the steak. Doesn’t look at me. “The journal my father mentioned. I think this might be in it.”
“Will you read it?”
“I said I would.”
“I know. I’m asking if you will.”
He looks at me then. Not the guarded look. The real one, the one that lets me see the full scope of what he’s carrying. The grief. The guilt. The tentative, terrifying hope that his mother left something behind that might help the woman he loves.
“Yes,” he says. “I’ll read it.”
I take the steak plates to the table. He brings the salad. We sit down across from each other, the map between us, and eat.
“The cluster near The Hare and Hound,” I say. “Three supernatural cases in two hundred metres. And it sits on one of the water channels.”
“You think the water is causing the incidents?”
“I think the water is marking something. A boundary, maybe. Or a source. The energy I feel at those sites isn’t random. It’s concentrated. Focused.” Ispear a piece of steak. Chew. Think. “Maggie would know.”
“Maggie knows everything. Getting her to share it is the challenge.”
“I’m patient.”
“You’re relentless. It’s different.”
“It’s effective.”
He smiles. The real one. I smile back, and the evening settles around us, warm and ordinary and full of the things we’re building together. A relationship. A home. A shared project of understanding this place that chose us, or that we chose, or both.
After dinner, I pin the map to the wall above my desk in the surgery. Step back. Look at it.
It’s incomplete. There are gaps where I haven’t walked yet, areas of the territory I haven’t sensed. The ridge is blank. The deeper forest is blank. The picture is forming, but slowly, the way any good research project forms. Data first. Pattern second. Theory third.
I’m not there yet. But I will be.
Roan comes up behind me. Wraps his arms around my waist. Rests his chin on the top of my head. We look at the map together.
“You’re going to figure this place out,” he says. It’s nota question.
“Yes.”
“And then?”
“Then I’ll know what I’m protecting. Then I’ll know what we’re protecting.”
His arms tighten. He doesn’t say anything else. He doesn’t need to. The bond hums between us, steady, certain. Outside, the November dark presses against the windows. The village sleeps. The patrols run the ridge.
