Page 3

"I like it." She says it simply, without performance, and something about the honesty of it catches me off guard. "Everyone I know talks like they're being recorded. It's nice to talk to someone who isn't performing."

I don't have a good response to that, so I just nod and pick up my axe again, and she lets me go without pushing further. But I feel her watching as I walk back toward the tree line, and I don't entirely hate it.

By the time I circle back to the ridge that evening, I've turned the conversation over in my head more times than I'd like to admit. There's a warmth under the fear in her, something genuine that a woman with her level of fame shouldn't have any reason to still carry. Most people who reach that kind of visibility lose whatever made them likeable in the first place. She hasn't.

It makes this harder. I was fine watching a stranger from a distance, doing a job Yvonne asked me to do, staying uninvolved the way I stay uninvolved in everything. But strangers don't sit on porch steps and tell you they like the quiet like it's the first honest thing they've said in months.

I find the tire tracks again in the fading light and follow them out to the main road, where they disappear onto pavement I can't track. Whoever left them is gone for now. That doesn't mean they're finished.

I stay on the ridge until well after her light goes out, same as last night, and I tell myself it's only because Yvonne asked me to.

3

ZOEY

The trail behind the cabin climbs through a stretch of maple and birch so bright it looks lit from within, and for almost two hours I forget to check over my shoulder.

I bring my phone only for the camera, no signal to speak of past the ridge anyway, and spend most of the morning stopping every few hundred feet to photograph things that would have embarrassed me a year ago. A woodpecker working a dead oak. A cluster of mushrooms growing at the base of a fallen log. Light coming through the canopy in shafts thick enough to look solid. Nobody's going to see these photos. There's no caption to write, no team to approve them first, no algorithm deciding whether they're worth anything. I take them because I want to, and that alone feels like something I haven't done in years.

By the time I loop back toward the cabin, my legs ache in a good way and my mind feels quieter than it has since before the attack. I let myself believe, just for those last few hundred yards, that this might actually work. That two months here might hand me back some version of the person I was before all of this.

Then I step inside and something's wrong.

It's nothing dramatic. Nothing smashed or missing. But the throw blanket on the couch, the one I folded before I left this morning, is bunched differently than I left it. The drawer in the kitchen where I put my spare phone charger is open half an inch, when I know I closed it. My laptop bag, tucked under the side table, sits at a slightly different angle.

I stand very still in the doorway and make myself breathe.

You're being paranoid, I tell myself, the same thing I told myself the first night. But my body doesn't believe it. My pulse is already climbing, my palms already damp, and underneath all of it is the specific, ugly memory my mind keeps trying to protect me from — a hand closing around my wrist, a voice too close to my ear, the particular helplessness of realizing that all the security in the world hadn't been enough.

I check every room. The bedroom closet has been gone through, my clothes shifted just enough that I notice. The bathroom cabinet is closed, but not the way I left it. Whoever was here wasn't looking for anything to steal. They were looking to confirm something. To confirm me.

I don't remember deciding to run outside, but I'm halfway across the yard before I catch myself, breathing hard, scanning the tree line for a threat I can't see.

That's where Kellan finds me.

He comes around the side of the cabin like he already knew something was wrong before I said a word, and maybe he did — I don't ask. He stops a few feet away, hands loose at his sides, reading my face the way he seems to read everything.

"Someone was inside," I manage. "I don't know who. Nothing's missing, but everything's — it's been touched. Moved."

He doesn't ask if I'm sure. He doesn't tell me I'm imagining things, the way half my old security team would have before finally, grudgingly, checking. He just says, "Show me," and follows me back inside.

I watch him move through the cabin with the same quiet focus I noticed in the woods yesterday, checking the door frame, the window latches, the dust on the sill. He crouches by the back door, studying something I can't see, then straightens.

"Lock's fine. No forced entry." He looks at me. "You always keep the spare key under the porch step?"

My stomach drops. "Yvonne mentioned it when I checked in. I didn't think⁠—"

"It's not your fault." His voice is steady, certain, and something in me settles slightly just from the tone of it. "Whoever did this knew where to look. That's not luck."

"So they knew about the key before they got here. That's not some random person who wandered onto the property."

"No." He says it simply, without trying to soften it, and I appreciate that more than I expect to. "It's not."

We spend the next hour going through the cabin together, moving the spare key somewhere only Yvonne and Kellan will know, checking every window latch twice, and Kellan produces a second deadbolt from somewhere in his truck like he keeps a small hardware store on hand for exactly this kind of emergency. Maybe he does. I don't ask.

Working alongside him, I notice how little he needs to say to get things done. He doesn't fill silence the way most people do, doesn't perform reassurance the way my team always did — the practiced calm, the rehearsed line about how everything's under control. When Kellan says something's fine, I believe him because he clearly wouldn't say it otherwise.

"Thank you," I say, once the new deadbolt is in and the last window latch is tightened. "I know this isn't really your job."