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His eyes search the trees with a focus that tightens my stomach. He cannot see me; I have chosen that. The forest wraps over my shape too completely for his human eyes.

Still, his brows furrow, and he looks deeper into the trees. “Hello?” he calls.

His voice reaches me for the first time. I have heard thousands of human voices before, yet his makes me want to return sound.

My throat shifts beneath fused bone on old instinct, though no word waits there. I have never learned what humans do with their mouths and tongues to shape their sounds. I understand their speech because listening requires nothing from my body. But speaking would.

His heartbeat has changed; I hear it from where I stand. He is wary, though not frightened. More than that, there is another change beneath the wariness, something that answers the new pull in the hollow in me.

He feels something, but he does not yet understand what.

I remain where I am long after he disappears inside. A light burns in the den window, and for the first time in as long as I can remember, I stay in one place because there is nowhere else I’d rather be.

The world has narrowed to one breathing body.

For millennia, I have moved through this forest because movement filled the emptiness of existing. Tonight, the emptiness inside me isn’t empty anymore. It’s restless, crowded, and awake.

Now there’s a word that fits in the space where nothing lived before.

Mine.

4

Lucas

When I make it back to the ranger cabin, the porch light is the only thing waiting for me.

The woods crowd around the place as I pull up, thick past the spill of the headlights. I kill the engine and sit there for a few seconds, hand on the wheel, listening to the engine tick down under me.

The day has been too full. I really had my work cut out for me on my first day, then dinner at Mel’s. Momma cried into my shoulder for a full minute when she saw me, then threatened to smack me for making her wait a whole day to see me.

It should have helped; I mean, parts of it did.

Mel made roast chicken, mashed potatoes, and green beans with enough butter to kill a man. Apparently, heartbreak means everyone tries to feed you until your organs surrender.

Her husband, Aaron, hugged me with one arm and slapped my back with the other the way men do when they want to show sympathy without saying anything too soft. Momma kept touching my face as if she needed proof that I was really there, then kept calling my ex ‘that girl’ with enough venom to strip paint off the walls. After the week I’ve had, ‘that girl’ is generous.

The house looked the same in the ways that mattered. Same photos lining the hallway, though Jonah’s face had aged from gap-toothed kid to broad-shouldered teenager in football gear while I was living five states away. Same dent in the kitchen table from when Mel dropped a cast-iron skillet on it. Same old couch that eats you if you sit in the left corner.

I stood in the doorway for a second after I arrived, and that stupid familiar smell of dinner, laundry detergent, and old wood nearly took me out at the knees.

Mel caught it; of course she did. She wrapped me up in a hug before I could make a joke out of it, pressing her cheek hard against my shoulder as she said, “I’m so glad you’re home, Luke.” I closed my eyes because that name made me feel seventeen and thirty-five at the same time.

Dinner was good, even with the ache underneath it. Everyone tried not to talk about my failed almost-marriage, which meant they talked around it with the subtlety of people carrying furniture through a narrow hallway. I told them I was fine until Mel gave me the look she used to give me when we were kids, and I swore I hadn’t eaten the last cookie even with chocolate still on my mouth.

Then Jonah came downstairs, and the entire atmosphere dipped. I still remember him as the kid who followed me around on trails in too-big boots, with a stick he insisted was a walking staff.

The last time I saw him, he was sixteen, restless and confident, built strong from football and carrying himself with the easy arrogance popular kids develop when the world has been kind to them. He was a tight end like I was, and had been proud of that.

The nineteen-year-old that walked down for dinner wasn’t the boy I remembered.

He was still big and broad through the shoulders, but he moved more carefully now. His eyes went straight to me, then to the back door, then to the window over the sink where the yard sat dark beyond the glass.

“Hey, kid,” I said, standing from the table because I had no idea what to do with the tightness in my chest. “You get too cool to hug your uncle now?”

That would have gotten me a grin not too long ago, but tonight Jonah’s mouth barely moved. He came over and let me hug him, but he stayed stiff in my arms.

“Hey,” he had said, voice lower than I remembered.