Page 27 of The Girl Who Cried Bigfoot

He groans, but there’s a flicker of a laugh buried in it. “You’re a terrible business partner, Wren Cassidy.”

“I’m the best one you’ve got,” I say, and for a moment, the statement feels like a promise. I’m the only one who knows the truth, the only one standing between him and the pocket-vested legions of the internet. It’s a terrifying responsibility, but as I look at him, standing tall against the dark Cascades, I realize I wouldn’t trade it for a fully booked lodge and a paid-off mortgage.

I pull my phone out of my pocket, the screen a jarringly bright white against the darkness of the porch. I need to check the hotline, a habit I haven’t been able to break even during my ‘Guardian of the Guardian’ duties. The notifications are a relentless crawl of sightings and theories, but one post on a local cryptid forum catches my eye.

It’s a photo, blurry and taken at a distance, showing a tall, dark figure moving near the lodge’s woodpile. The caption reads: Spotted at Cassidy Lodge. Is this the ‘Silent Neighbor’? Or just the most suspiciously large employee in Washington state?

The figure in the photo is unmistakably Rowan, even through the digital grain. He’s carrying a stack of logs that would break a normal man’s back, and his posture is identical to the one he’s currently holding against the porch rail. The conspiracy thread underneath is already fifty comments deep, with people analyzing the length of his stride and the width of his shoulders.

A cold knot of dread tightens in my stomach. The hotline was a joke, a way to keep the lights on, but the internet is starting to look closer than I ever intended. The mystery isn’t just in the woods anymore; it’s on my porch, wearing a T-shirt from my gift shop and looking at me with a sincerity that makes my chest ache.

“Everything okay?” Rowan asks, noticing the way my thumb has stopped scrolling. He leans down, trying to see the screen, and I quickly lock the phone and slide it back into my pocket.

“Fine,” I say, forcing a smile that I know doesn’t reach my eyes. I know I should tell him because of our we-talk-first rule, but I can’t bring myself to do it just yet. “Just Barnaby’s fans being enthusiastic. We should probably head back in before he starts a live demonstration of scent marking. I don’t think Marge’s cobbler can survive that kind of atmosphere.”

Rowan grunts, his eyes lingering on my pocket for a second before he nods. He knows I’m lying, or at least that I’m hiding something, but he doesn’t push. He’s a creature of the forest; he knows that some things are better left in the shadows until they’re ready to be seen.

“After you, Manager,” he says, stepping back to let me lead the way. As I touch the door handle, I can feel him right behind me, a massive, silent presence that feels more like home than any building I’ve ever lived in. The blurry photo in my pocket feels like a ticking clock, but for now, I just want to listen to the sound of his boots on the boards and the way he scoffs when Barnaby starts talking about “solitary males” again.

I open the door, and the heat and noise of the common room wash over us. Barnaby is currently explaining how Sasquatch footprints are actually a form of landscape art. I hear Rowan’s breath hitch as he prepares his next rebuttal, and I can’t help but smile. The world is coming for us, but for tonight, we’re just two people in a lodge, united by the absolute certainty that everything this man knows is wrong.

15

WREN

GREAT-GREAT-GRANDMA NAMED HIM AFTER A TREE, OUT OF SPITE

The dust in the cellar is a fine, gray silt that has spent the last forty years settling over the skeletal remains of my family’s ambitions. I click on the single bare bulb dangling from the ceiling. It hums, a low-frequency vibration that makes my teeth ache. Two weeks have passed since Barnaby’s lecture in the common room, and this is the first morning I haven’t been jolted awake by the digital scream of the Bigfoot Hotline. The silence feels heavy, almost suspicious, like the forest is holding its breath while I hide among the filing cabinets.

I pull a box labeled *Insurance – 1994* from the bottom shelf. The cardboard is soft with damp, giving way under my thumbs. I’m not here for a trip down memory lane. I’m here because the bank sent a notice that was printed in a shade of red that usually precedes a sheriff’s sale. My art history degree taught me how to identify a forged Titian, but it didn’t prepare me for the creative accounting required to keep a lodge from collapsing into its own foundation.

I need a deed, a secondary insurance rider, or a forgotten land grant—anything that might serve as collateral for a bridge loan. Sentimentality is a luxury for people whose bank accounts aren’t currently screaming in agony.

I open the ledger for the current quarter, tracing the columns with a pen that’s running out of ink. The numbers tell a story of frantic, messy survival. Bookings are up forty percent. The hotline chaos has turned the lodge into a destination for people who own tactical flashlights and believe in interdimensional portals. The revenue is real, a jagged spike on a graph that should be flatlining. But the underlying debt—the mortgage my father took out to repair the roof in 2012, the property taxes that are currently six months overdue—is a black hole that swallows every dollar before it even hits the register.

The viral bump bought us time, but not a fix. If the interest rates climb another point, the Cassidy Lodge becomes a historical footnote, and I become the woman who lost over a hundred years of history because she couldn’t stop checking her phone. I shove the ledger aside, the paper scraping against the grit of the rickety desk we keep down here. My hands are shaking, just a little, so I grab another ledger off the shelf at random to give them something to do.

I recognize the handwriting immediately. It’s the same as the journal upstairs in the office. It belongs to Florence Cassidy, my great-great-grandmother, who struck the deal with Rowan. I shouldn’t be reading it. I should be looking for the 2008 seismic survey or something else that would help. But curiosity sparks inside me, and a few minutes won’t put us deeper in the hole.

I flip the cover open. The paper is thick, hand-pressed, and yellowed to the color of a bruised apple. The ink is iron gall, biting into the fibers with a permanence that modern pens can’t touch. I squint at the elegant, sharp loops of her script. It’s a record of a winter that nearly ended the lodge before it truly began—the Great Freeze of 1902. I note it’s after the fire, the one where Rowan helped save my ancestors. She writes about the wolves coming to the porch and the woodpiles running dry. And then, tucked between an entry about salted pork and a recipe for spruce beer, I find him.

‘The tall fellow past the tree line came again last night. He brought a brace of deer and left them by the smokehouse. He does not speak, but his eyes have the look of an old mountain that has seen too many landslides. We’ve come to an arrangement since he saved my children. He keeps the perimeter, and I keep the records. A fair trade for a man who has no use for coin.’

A memory shifts in the back of my mind, cold and sudden. My mother used to sit on the edge of my bed when the power went out during summer storms. She’d tell stories to drown out the thunder, tales of a man named Rowan who had lived in the forest since the first stone was laid. I’d dismissed them as folklore, the kind of harmless family mythology people invent to make a lonely life feel crowded. After the accident on the highway, those stories had become part of the grief, things I didn’t want to verify because verification meant acknowledging what was lost.

I trace the name where it appears in the margins. It’s written with a smirk I can practically feel through the decades. There was no one left to ask. My father never mentioned him. My mother kept him in the realm of bedtime stories. I’d lived my whole life on the edge of a secret that was waiting for a marketing gimmick to drag it into the light. I close my eyes, the smell of the old paper mixing with the phantom scent of pine and Rowan’s honey. I feel like a fool, and I feel like a daughter who missed the most important lesson her parents ever tried to teach her.

I keep reading, my thumb catching on a loose thread in the binding. Florence details the naming. It wasn’t a ceremony; it was a joke. Rowan had refused to provide a name, or perhaps he didn’t have one that fit a human tongue. He called himself a Guardian, a title Florence found entirely too self-important for a man who spent his days talking to bees. She decided on Rowan because of the trees she’d planted by the gate to ward off spirits and fae. She’d named the protector after the very thing meant to keep him out. It was an act of defiance, a way to remind him that even if he owned the forest, she owned the porch.

The stairs groan overhead. Marge’s footsteps are unmistakable—heavy, rhythmic, the sound of a woman who has spent forty years mastering the physics of a commercial kitchen. I tuck the journal under my arm and head up the narrow flight. I detour into the office and grab the other journal, where I’d first read about Rowan, then go into the kitchen.

Marge is standing at the prep table, her hands deep in a bowl of biscuit dough, her face set in a mask of professional concentration.

“You look like you’ve been digging for coal, Wren,” she says without looking up. “There’s soot on your nose.”

I put the journals on the clean end of the table.

Marge stops kneading. She wipes her hands on her apron, leaving white streaks of flour across the denim. She looks at the book, then at me, her eyes narrowing in a way that usually means I’m about to be lectured on the importance of proper breakfast. But she doesn’t lecture. She reaches out and touches the leather with a gentleness that surprises me.