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I know where it should be. I know the split in the rock, the root-hung entrance, the way the ground dips just before the hollow opens. I know all of it with the certainty of muscle memory because I walked there more than once, slept there, and woke there.

But every time I follow that route now, the forest shifts just enough to mock me. The slope is there. The split boulder is there. The old cedar log near the creek is there. The den isn’t.

It’s like the earth swallowed it whole and smoothed the dirt over afterward.

The stone mouth becomes a wall of fern and root. The open patch outside it becomes a tangle of laurel so thick I can’t push through without cutting, and I won’t cut there. I walk the same line three times under a half-moon, muttering directions to myself like a man who has lost his mind and is trying to map it.

“Creek on the left, split cedar, rock shelf, twenty steps uphill,” I say, voice too loud in the trees. “This is where it was. This is where it fuckin’ was.”

The forest gives me nothing.

No Labrador tea. No pressure in the bond. No dry little comment about my poor tracking. No pulse of amusement when I trip over a root and curse loud enough to make an owl launch itself out of a branch.

Nothing.

The mark stays on my shoulder, though.

That’s what keeps me from tipping fully into maybe I imagined him. It’s there every morning in the mirror, dark and healed and shaped too deliberately to be anything I did to myself. I touch it while brushing my teeth. I touch it at red lights. I touch it when Parker squints at my collar and asks if I got into poison ivy—a stupidly normal question that makes me almost laugh in his face.

“I’m fine,” I tell him.

“You keep saying that,” Parker says, looking unconvinced, “and yet you’ve got the haunted ranger vibe going on.”

“Maybe that’s just my face.”

“Nah, your face is usually more emotionally constipated than haunted.”

That should make me laugh. On a better day, it would. Instead, I look toward the office window where the trees shift beyond the parking lot and feel the empty place in me ache so deeply I have to set my mug down before I drop it.

Another week passes.

Then another.

A month after he leaves, the full moon comes up, fat and silver over the ridge, and whatever thin thread of dignity I’ve been using to hold myself together finally snaps.

I leave the cabin just after nine wearing boots, jeans, a flannel, a jacket, and the kind of emotional instability that should require a permit. I take my radio because I’m still a ranger, and apparently some pathetic part of me wants credit for being responsible while marching into the woods to yell at a supernatural boyfriend who may or may not be ghosting me via divine intervention.

I don’t take my headlamp out at first. The moon is bright enough to turn the trail pale, and I hate how much it reminds me of the night he showed me his first face and waited for fear.

“I’m not chasin’ you into the deepwood,” I say to the trees, because if he’s anywhere near me, he can damn well hear it. “I’m walkin’ in a forest I’m paid to know. Completely different thing.”

No answer.

I go farther.

Past the north trail marker. Past the creek crossing. Past the slope where the air usually cools before his den. The woods look almost too beautiful, which feels insulting. Silver branches, black trunks, ferns shining like wet blades, the creek moving softly below. Everything calm. Everything whole. Meanwhile, my chest feels full of broken glass and bad ideas.

I stop where the den should be.

Nothing.

Not a scent. Not a hum. Not even the faintest brush of him against the bond.

The silence finally breaks me.

I sink down onto a fallen log because my legs won’t hold me upright anymore. For a few minutes, I just breathe, shakily and too fast, while staring at the empty slope like if I look hard enough, it will give him back. Then my throat closes. I press the heel of my hand against the mark and hate that it’s still warm, hate that my body still knows him even when he won’t answer.

“What did I do wrong?” I ask, and my voice sounds small, which makes me furious. “Was it Hannah? Was it because I said yes and liked it when you were jealous? Because I did. I did like it, and maybe that’s fucked up, but I trusted you. I thought you trusted me too.”