Page 43 of The Girl Who Cried Bigfoot

I scan the signature line. The cursor on the screen is blinking, a steady, demanding pulse. I think about the way Rowan looked in the lobby earlier—the exhaustion in his eyes, the way he carried that man like he was made of nothing but duty. He shouldn’t have to do it alone. And I shouldn’t have to keep the lodge together with spit and marketing prayers.

We talk first.

Tamping down the guilt, I sign the digital document. My name looks small and thin in the official font. Wren Cassidy, Owner/Operator. I hit send, and for a second, the weight lifts. The success notification pops up, green and bright. I’ve done it. I’ve saved the house. I’ve saved the history. I’ve saved us.

I close the laptop, ready to finally crawl into bed, when my email pings again. A follow-up from the lead producer, a woman named Sarah Vance. Wonderful news, Wren. We’re thrilled to work with you. Our lead scout actually spent some time in your local forums tonight following the Eagle Crest rescue.

My hand stops halfway to the lamp switch. A cold prickle starts at the base of my neck and crawls upward. I open the email. There’s an attachment—a high-resolution enhancement of the forum video. They’ve run it through a stabilization filter I didn’t even know existed. The silhouette isn’t a silhouette anymore.

We aren’t interested in the hotline callers or the gift shop stories anymore. We’ve identified the subject in the rescue footage. Tall, distinct facial structure, consistent with the man seen at the Jones lecture. We’re calling him ‘Subject Prime.’ Our crew is already en route. Our primary objective is a sustained tracking operation of this specific individual.

All the air seems to have been sucked out of the room. The green success notification is still visible on the edge of the screen, but it looks like a neon warning sign now. They don’t want the lodge. They don’t want the mystery. They want the man who just texted me to tell me the ridge was quiet.

I didn’t sell the joke. I sold the person who isn’t supposed to exist. I signed a contract that gives a professional tracking team the right to be on my property, using my lodge as a base, to hunt the man I just spent the night holding in the dark. And I can’t take it back. The production fee is already being wired. The access is granted.

I stand up, my legs feeling like they belong to someone else. I need to find Rowan. I need to tell him. But I stop. If I tell him now, he’ll run. He’ll vanish into the deep timber and he won’t come back, and the media crew will spend three weeks tearing this mountain apart looking for him. If he leaves, the contract is breached, the money is clawed back, and I lose everything.

I sink back into the chair, the leather cold against my skin. I’m a manager. I’m an art history major who learned how to curate a reality. I can fix this. I can redirect them. I just need a few hours to figure out how to point them toward a different ridge. I can’t tell Rowan yet. Not until I have a plan to keep the camera lenses away from his face.

I look out the window at the dark tree line. Somewhere out there, he’s watching the mountain, thinking the threat is gone. He’s a Guardian, and he thinks I’m his partner. But as the sun starts to gray the edge of the horizon, I realize I’ve just become the very thing he’s been guarding the forest against. I’m the plague. And I’m the only one who can stop it before the drones start to fly.

I don’t go to bed. I pull up a map of the North Ridge and start looking for places where a man could disappear, even from a thermal camera. I have three days before the crew arrives. I have seventy-two hours to figure out how to lie better than I’ve ever lied in my life. The dread is a physical weight in my stomach, a cold, hard stone that no amount of marketing spin can dissolve.

The lodge is silent, but the silence feels different now. It isn’t the peaceful quiet of the cascades; it’s the breath before a storm hits. I’ve traded my soul for a roof that doesn’t leak, and as the first light hits the sign, I realize I might have just burned down the only thing worth protecting.

I pick up my phone to reply to his text, but my thumbs hover over the screen. I’m going to sleep now, I type. See you tomorrow. I hit send, and the lie feels like ash in my mouth. I’m not going to sleep. I’m going to war, and the man I love is the target.

I spend the next hour in a state of frantic, clinical observation. My brain, usually so good at compartmentalizing the absurd, is spinning out a thousand different scenarios, each one worse than the last. I pull up the Aethelgard contract again, my eyes scanning the fine print with the desperation of a captive looking for a loose stone. It’s all there, in black and white. The production fee—that initial fifty-thousand-dollar lifeline—is essentially a kill fee for the lodge’s privacy. Once that money hits my account, they have the right to film anywhere on the deeded property, and they have the right to shadow any personnel or residents who appear in the initial promotional material or relevant social media threads.

Rowan isn’t an employee. He isn’t a resident. But in the eyes of a media lawyer, he’s the Mystery Man of Eagle Crest. He’s the star of the show they just bought, and I’m the one who handed them the keys to his front door. I try to find a clause about participant consent, but the language is slick. They aren’t asking for his permission to be a character; they’re documenting a public interest event on private land where I’ve already granted them full access.

The distinction between the two payments is the only thing keeping me from a complete atmospheric collapse. The fifty thousand is a flat fee for access and footage. It’s mine regardless of whether they find a monster or a mountain goat. But the half-million? The life-changing, debt-erasing, legacy-securing half-million is the Development Option. They’ll only pay that once they get their proof. It’s a bounty. I’ve put a five-hundred-thousand-dollar bounty on the head of the man who just saved a life at my request.

I stand up and pace the small office, my socks sliding on the polished wood. I need to think like a producer. If Sarah Vance is as good as her résumé suggests, she isn’t going to be satisfied with blurry footprints. She’s going to want the Subject Prime reveal. She’s going to want to see him change. She’s going to want to know how a man of that size moves through a forest without being seen. She’s going to want to see him with me.

The thought makes my stomach turn. Every look we’ve shared, every quiet moment in his house with the oversized chairs, every second of tension in the trail shelter… it all feels like a vulnerability they can exploit. They’ll see the way I look at him. They’ll see that he isn’t just a cryptid; he’s a man who has lived a very long, very lonely life, and they’ll strip that away for a three-episode limited series.

I walk to the window and press my forehead against the cool glass. The sun is higher now, casting long, pale shadows across the gravel lot. In a few hours, Marge will be in the kitchen, Walt will be checking the generators, and the first of the morning hikers will be asking about the Bigfoot from the news. My life is about to become a very expensive, very public cage.

I start a list on a yellow legal pad, my handwriting jagged and tight. 1. Move the trail cameras. 2. Establish a ‘no-go’ zone for the crew based on ‘dangerous terrain.’ 3. Give Rowan a way to stay in the deep timber. 4. Fake a sighting on the South Ridge.

The fourth point is the most important. If I can convince them he’s miles away from the lodge, I can keep them busy. I can feed them the curated encounters I promised myself I’d use. I can spend my days leading a high-end film crew on a wild goose chase through the roughest parts of the Cascades, while Rowan stays safe in his territory. It’s a lie, but it’s one meant to protect. It’s the kind of lie my family has been telling for a hundred years, just updated for a 4K resolution world.

But the dread won’t leave. It’s sitting right behind my breastbone, cold and heavy. Because Sarah Vance didn’t just mention the rescue. She mentioned the Jones lecture. They’ve done their homework. They aren’t just following a myth; they’re following a trail of breadcrumbs I left behind when I was too busy being clever to be careful. They know he exists in human form. They know he’s here.

I hear the low rumble of a truck engine in the distance. The first delivery of the day, or perhaps the vanguard of the media circus. I close the legal pad and shove it into the bottom drawer of the desk, locking it with a sharp click. I can’t go to Rowan yet. If I go to him now, I’ll tell him everything, and I’ll watch the light go out of his eyes when he realizes I’m just another human who saw a profit margin instead of a person. I need to have the lie ready first. I need to be able to tell him I have it under control.

I look at the phone one last time. No more texts. He’s likely asleep or merged back into the silence of the trees, unaware that the world is coming for him with a signed contract and a thermal lens. I turn off the office light, leaving the room to the gray, indifferent morning. I saved the lodge, but as I walk toward the stairs, the weight of the key in my pocket feels like a brand. I’m a Cassidy, and I’ve just done what Cassidys do best: I’ve protected the land by selling the truth. I just hope that this time, the truth doesn’t decide to leave me behind in the wreckage.

24

WREN

ENTER THE DOCUMENTARY CREW, STAGE LEFT

The silver SUV pulling into the gravel lot is a sleek, matte-finished beast with tinted windows and a roof rack loaded with hard-shell equipment cases. Two more follow in a coordinated line, kicking up a plume of gray dust that settles over the rotting lodge sign like a funeral shroud. The silence of the Cascades doesn’t stand a chance. It’s punctured by the rhythmic thud of heavy doors and the professional, clipped tones of people who are paid to find things that don’t want to be found.

I stand on the porch, my hands shoved deep into the pockets of my cardigan to hide the way my fingers were twitching. I’ve known they were coming for three days. I spent those seventy-two hours in a fever of clinical redirection, moving trail cameras to the most boring stretches of cedar-thicket and drafting a ‘Safety Protocol’ map that conveniently labeled Rowan’s entire territory as an active rockslide zone. I’m a Cassidy. I’m supposed to be the gatekeeper. But looking at the sheer volume of black Pelican cases being unloaded, I feel less like a guardian and more like a woman who was trying tried to hold back a mudslide with a decorative garden fence.