Page 22 of The Girl Who Cried Bigfoot

“Is it getting harder?” I ask, my voice softer now. I want to make a joke to crack the tension, but it feels wrong, like telling a joke at a funeral. “With the hotline. The viral stuff. Is it more weight than before?”

Rowan doesn’t answer immediately. He looks up at the canopy, watching the way the light breaks through the branches. “The world is louder than it was when your great-great-grandmother named me. There are more eyes now. More glass lenses that do not blink. It is... persistent.”

His words land like a physical blow. I think about the call logs and the thousands of red notifications blooming across my screen like a rash. I thought I was saving the lodge. I thought I was playing a clever game where nobody got hurt because the monster wasn’t real.

But the monster is real. He’s standing in front of me, wearing a twenty-four-dollar T-shirt, and he’s exhausted from trying to stay invisible while I scream his location into a megaphone.

“I should go back.” I don’t look at him. I can’t. “Marge will have lunch ready, and I have... I have work to do.”

“The survey?” he asks, a faint trace of his dry humor returning. “The counting of the moss?”

“Something like that.” I start walking, my father’s boots feeling heavier than usual. I don’t trip once on the way down, too focused on the weight of the phone in my pocket, and the responsibility that’s currently rewriting every line of my business plan to think about the stupid lace that keeps untying itself.

When I reach the lodge, the common room is full of people. Barnaby Jones is back for the weekend, and he’s holding court near the fireplace, gesturing wildly with a piece of charred wood he probably found in the parking lot. Tyler is there, too, checking the footage on his drone’s controller while a small crowd of hikers leans in to see.

“Look at that shadow! It’s the same shadow that’s on that forum post,” Tyler says, his voice full of a frantic, tech-bro energy. “The way it slides out of frame. That’s a biological cloaking mechanism, man. I’m telling you!”

My heart starts to beat a little faster, and I stride past them without saying a word. I go straight to the office and sit at the desk. The digital dashboard is a riot of voicemails, tags on social media, and a flood of emails asking for trail maps to the North Ridge.

My finger hovers over the Delete All button for the North Ridge folder. I think about Rowan standing by that rock, the sweat on his forehead, the way the world shimmered when he tried to hide.

I don’t press the button. Deleting everything would be too suspicious. It’s time for a different tactic. Rolling my shoulders back, I start a new draft for a blog post. I title it: Atmospheric Anomalies and Lens Flare: Why Your Bigfoot Photos are Actually Just Physics.

Over the next three hours, I write a detailed, clinical debunking of the latest sighting. I use my art history vocabulary to talk about focal lengths and forced perspective and the way light interacts with mountain mist. I make it sound utterly boring and like a mistake.

At two o’clock, Marge knocks on the door, carrying a tray with a sandwich and a glass of tea. She looks at the screen. “Looks like you’re trying to solve a murder, Wren. Everything all right?”

“Just refining the brand, Marge,” I say, still typing. “Turns out, the brand needs a lot less mystery and a lot more science.”

“Science is hard to sell to people who want to see a giant,” she says, setting the tray down. “But I suppose you know what you’re doing. You always did have your father’s stubborn streak when it came to the truth.”

When she leaves, I pick up the sandwich and take a bite. My appetite is sorely lacking, overpowered by the guilt that’s swarming me for what I’ve unknowingly been doing to Rowan, so the ham and cheese tastes like woodsmoke and dust.

Grimacing, I swallow and glance at the framed photo of my father that I moved onto my desk. He’s smiling, his SAR gear bright against the green of the forest. He spent his life finding people who were lost. I’ve been doing the opposite.

I pull up the forum post Tyler was talking about. It’s a grainy video of a tall figure moving through the trees near the trailhead. The comments are filled with speculation and excitement. I lean back in my chair, watching the loop of the shadow sliding out of frame.

I snort. Biological cloaking mechanism, indeed. I know now it’s an act of will that costs Rowan a lot of effort. He’s been drowning in ring lights and cameras, doing his best to keep people from seeing him, and it’s all my fault.

I pick up my phone and send a text to the burner phone I gave Rowan. Post scheduled. The Hotline Hottie is officially a camera glitch caused by mineral deposits in the rock face. You’re welcome.

The reply comes ten minutes later. Mineral deposits. Creative.

I smile, but there’s no joy in it.

Turning back to the screen, I start the process of moving the Bigfoot search area to a section of the forest that Rowan told me was nothing but shale and scrub brush. It’s miles away from his hives, miles away from his home.

The hotline pings again, but I don’t look at the notification, my fingers moving over the keyboard with a new, quiet purpose. The lodge is still failing, the bank is still calling, and the forest is still full of people with cameras. But for the first time since I came back to this mountain, I’m not just running a hoax. I’m running a defense.

Later, I go to bed, but after an hour of staring at the ceiling, I go back to the office, staring out the window and waiting for a shimmer that never comes.

I wake with the sun, my neck stiff from the angle of the chair and the blue light of the monitor still burned into my retinas. The lodge is quiet. Usually, the heavy pre-coffee silence is my sanctuary, but today, it feels more like a countdown. Rubbing a hand over my face, I trudge into the kitchen, following the scent of sizzling bacon and strong coffee. Marge slides a steaming mug toward me with a look that is far too perceptive for six in the morning.

“I’m moving the hot spot trackers today,” I say, my voice raspy. “I’m going to tell the ten o’clock tour that the North Ridge is a dead zone because of some geological interference. We’re pushing them toward the old quarry on the south side.”

Marge pauses, her spatula hovering over the griddle. “That’s a long walk for a lot of nothing, Wren. You think they’ll buy it?”

“They’ll buy whatever story I frame for them,” I reply, and the realization doesn’t feel like a victory anymore. It’s nothing but a chore now. “If I tell them the magnetic fields there distort Bigfoot’s ‘vibration,’ they’ll spend all day taking photos of gravel and feeling enlightened.”