After a while, time ceased to feel measurable. It announced itself only through changes. A different chill in the air, light shifting through the trees, the body accommodating what it once resisted. Some days, the fear of the police coming to find us felt almost too big to live with.
I never talked to Zwierek about it, but I’m sure he knew anyway. I’d always had an easier time than most disappearing into my own thoughts, and the days out there in the forest only made it worse. Some days, it felt like the woods were going to swallow me whole if I stayed in my head for too long. I started getting desperate for something to hold onto, and little by little, I found my way back to reading again.
I remember a small town at the edge of the woods, a window left ajar at the back of a building, and the dry scent of paper and dust drifting out before I knew what the place was. No alarms, no real locks, it was almost too easy.
I took what I could carry, but never indiscriminately. Whatever seemed worth keeping. I brought them back to a place in the forest I had kept hidden. Not from fear of losing it, only from the need for something to remain solely mine.
It was near enough to reach easily, far enough that the shelter’s sounds did not carry. Beyond a small clearing lay a lake, modest and strangely still. The water held an unnatural green, as though time itself had sunk into it and gone motionless. That was where I sat, a book always resting in my lap. White flowers grew there, drooping from thin stems as though burdened by themselves. Their petals folded inward, protective, almost secretive. They seemed out of keeping with the forest, almost too exact in their fragility. I noticed them early.
After that, I found myself returning to them as often as the books.
Sometimes, little Ghost, significance reveals itself only after attention has already taken hold. I read there for hours at a time.Long enough for the light to alter without my noticing when it began. What had once felt like a reflex began to feel closer to choice. That unsettled me for a time, then even that passed.
Weeks passed. Then months.
The fear of being found did not leave so much as wear thin.
After a while, I stopped expecting footsteps, engines, voices moving through the trees. Nothing came. No one came. It was almost harder to believe in that than in pursuit.
We changed without speaking of it. Habits gathered slowly. We rose with the light, checked traps, moved through the woods with care, watched more than we spoke. Ate when there was food. Trained until movement became instinct. And the books, always the books.
By nineteen, survival no longer felt like the right word. It was simply the life we were inside. What had happened remained between us, never named, never gone. And somewhere in those months, my reading began to turn. At first, toward animals, anatomy, survival. Later, toward something I could not yet understand, only felt drawing nearer. He never stopped me. That should say enough. I began finding myself dwelling on things I once could not have borne to keep near. By then, something in me had altered. Not only in what I had done, but in what was taking root.
You feel it too, don’t you?
Don’t lie to me, little Ghost. You don’t need to.
There’s a difference between hearing something and letting it register. You’ve let in more than you should. That’s what I like about you. Most people pull back. You don’t. You let it settle, like my good fucking girl is supposed to do.
But be careful.
Not with me, with yourself. Because once something begins to make sense, it does not easily loosen its hold. Change rarelyarrives as a moment. It gathers beforehand. And we were nearing that, though I did not know it then.
It gathered in habits, in thoughts left unchallenged, in the way what once felt wrong could, little by little, lose even the sensation of wrongness. Then one day, something small gives it away. A hesitation that does not come. A refusal that never forms. Some boundary crossed so quietly you notice only in retrospect. That is how it happens. By then, little Ghost, the moment you imagine yourself waiting for lies behind you. And I suspect you know very well what follows.
The Recurrence
Chapter 18
If there was one thing the forest did better than anything else, it was making time bleed together. There was a period when things almost seemed settled.
I never felt safe, and nothing about the way we lived would’ve looked normal to any sane person, but somehow we still fell into our own rhythm inside that little cabin hidden out in the woods.
There was order in repetition, though nothing comforting in it. Food, movement, silence. The woods, the shelter, the lake. Zwierek, and me. I had stopped questioning it by then. That impulse had worn away somewhere along the route, leaving something harder to name in its place. It had become something that no longer required constant tending.
There was a town around forty minutes from where we stayed.
We made sure we moved carefully and never used the same path twice. Small enough that strangers passed unnoticed, provided they did nothing to disturb attention. I went for what I always went for. Books. The building never changed. The same smell, the same stillness. Paper, dust, and beneath it some faint trace that made the place seem older than its years.
I remember thinking, only for a moment, that it felt almost familiar.
That thought should have unsettled me more than it did. Familiarity has a way of loosening caution. I didn’t stay long. I moved through the shelves quickly, fingers grazing over spines, not really reading titles so much as sensing what might be worth taking. By then, I’d been there enough times to know exactly where every book was placed.
I already had two books tucked into one hand, my eyes moving over the spines on the shelves when I saw it.
The Count of Monte Cristo.
For the first time in years, I felt something pull at my face, unnatural and unfamiliar. A crooked smile that barely looked like one, but I could feel it forming on my lips anyway. Looking back on it now, it feels strange that I would smile at that memory. At its core, it was a place filled with violence and grief, but that book had been the one thing I held onto through all of it, second only to Zwierek.
