Page 48 of The Girl Who Cried Bigfoot

Thankfully, it’s just Marge, holding a tray with a heavy ceramic bowl and a glass of milk. The smell of beef stew hits me, a sharp, grounding contrast to the smell of ozone and wet wool that’s been clinging to my lungs since the storm started.

“You haven’t eaten all day, Wren,” she says. She doesn’t ask if I’m okay or mention the footage as she clears a space on the desk, pushing aside a stack of overdue invoices to make room for the tray.

“I’m not hungry, Marge,” I say. The scent of the stew reminds me of a life that no longer exists.

“Eat it anyway,” Marge says, pulling up the guest chair. She sits down with the heavy, deliberate sigh of a woman who has seen three generations of Cassidys try to outrun their own shadows. “The internet can wait ten minutes for you to eat. It’s not going anywhere. That’s the trouble with it.”

I pick up the spoon because it’s impossible not to with Marge looking at me. The first bite is hot and salty, a reminder that my body is still a physical thing that requires maintenance, even when my brain is currently vibrating at the frequency of a server crash.

“He’s gone, isn’t he?” I ask, looking at the dark reflection in the window. “I saw him in the mudroom. He looked... he looked like he was already miles away.”

“He’s a Guardian, Wren,” she says quietly. “Their first instinct is to protect. Their second is to hide. You can’t blame a man for doing what he was built for, even if the world decided to put a spotlight on the hiding spot.”

“I did this. The hotline. The marketing. I turned a secret into a brand. I thought I was being clever. I thought I was saving us.”

I look at the photo of my father. He kept the secret his whole life. He walked those trails for decades and never once thought about how to monetize the silence. I came back with an art history degree and a desperate need to balance a ledger, and I sold the only thing that was never mine to sell.

“Your father would have been proud of the rescue, Wren,” Marge says. She reaches across the desk and covers my hand with hers. Her skin is rough, calloused from decades of kitchen work, and warm. “The rest of it? The cameras and the shouting? That’s just another storm. We’ve had bad winters before. We’ve had seasons where the rain didn’t stop for a month and the roof leaked in every room. We stayed. We fixed the roof.”

“This isn’t a leaky roof, Marge. This is the house burning down. Aethelgard just sent over a revised offer. It’s a buyout offer. The money… it’s enough to clear the debt, to ensure you and Walt have a pension. Hell, it’s enough to build another lodge.”

I pull a single sheet of paper from under the tray. The numbers are long, followed by enough zeros to make my head swim. It’s the financial lifeline I’ve been praying for. It’s the answer to every late-night panic attack and every cold morning spent wondering if we’d have enough fuel for the generator.

“And what do they want for it?” Marge asks.

“They want Rowan,” I say. “They don’t use his name, of course. They call it ‘exclusive access to the biological anomaly.’ They want to turn this forest into a closed set. They want to hunt him with drones and thermal sensors until they have enough content for a ten-part series. They want to own the myth.”

The silence that follows is heavy because I’ve just told her the price of our survival is someone else’s soul. I think about Rowan in his house, and the honey that smells like wildflowers. I think about him wearing that ridiculous HIDE & SEEK WORLD CHAMPION shirt, his amber eyes sparking with a dry, ancient humor that I’ve grown to crave more than air.

I destroyed that humor tonight. I saw it go out on camera when the SAR team looked at him with pity. I saw it vanish when Jax started talking about proxies and cloud servers.

“He thinks he’s a monster now,” I whisper. “Because the world is treating him like one. And he thinks I’m a victim because I’m the human caught in the middle. We’re both sitting in different rooms convinced we’ve killed the only thing that mattered.”

“Then you’re both being idiots,” Marge says. She stands and takes the tray, having made peace with me not eating. “Guilt is a lazy emotion, Wren. It gives you an excuse to sit in the dark and do nothing. You want to save him? Then stop looking at the numbers and start looking at the man. He’s not a biological anomaly. He’s a person who likes peach cobbler and gets cranky when the drones wake up the bees.”

The door closes behind her, leaving me alone with the blue light and the clicking of the hard drive. My personal phone pings. It’s a text from Sarah Vance. The footage is trending at number one on three platforms. We need to talk about the morning press release. This is the big one, Wren.

I look at the buyout offer. It’s sitting there on the desk, a white rectangle of paper that represents security, safety, and a future without debt. It represents a world where I don’t have to worry about the Cassidy Lodge sign leaning to the left or the rot winning in the floorboards. All I have to do is sign it. All I have to do is give them the right to hunt the man I love.

I pick up a pen. The plastic feels cold in my fingers. I think about the mountain, the way it feels when the mist rolls in and the only sound is the wind in the old growth. I think about Rowan’s hand covering mine in the mudroom—the sheer, overwhelming weight of a trust I didn’t deserve. He didn’t ask me to save him. He just assumed I would know what to do.

The internet never forgets. The footage is out there, part of the permanent record of human curiosity. I can’t take it back. I can’t un-ring the bell. I am an art historian who specialized in the iconography of the Renaissance; I know that once a symbol is out in the world, it belongs to everyone.

But Rowan doesn’t belong to everyone. He belongs to the mountain. And maybe, in some small, terrifying way, he belongs to me.

I put the pen down. I don’t sign the paper. I don’t answer Sarah’s text. I just sit in the dark and watch the red notification light on the hotline phone pulse like a heartbeat—fast, frantic, and stubborn. I don’t have a plan yet. I don’t have a way to fix centuries of silence being broken in three minutes of 4K video.

But I know one thing. I can curate a mystery. And if the world wants a monster, I’m going to give them something else entirely. I’m going to give them the truth, and then I’m going to make them wish they’d never looked for it.

The chair groans as I lean back. The storm is still screaming outside. I look at the buyout offer one last time before sliding it into the bottom drawer of the desk, right next to my father’s old trail maps. I’m not taking the money. Not yet. Because once you sell the mountain, there’s nowhere left to hide.

I stand up, my joints popping in the quiet room. The office feels too small, the air thick with the residue of my own indecision. I need to move. I need to find the one person who doesn’t want me to sell a piece of my soul or buy a piece of the forest. I need to find Rowan.

But the mudroom is empty. The sodden heap of his ‘Hide & Seek’ shirt is still there, a pathetic puddle of cotton on the floorboards, but the man is gone. The door leading to the back porch is open, swinging slightly in the wind, letting in a fine spray of rain that makes the wood swell. Rowan has gone back to the only place that ever felt safe, a place that is currently being triangulated by every amateur sleuth with a high-speed connection.

I walk out onto the porch, the cold air hitting my face like a slap. The forest is a wall of blackness, the trees swaying in a violent, synchronized dance. Somewhere out there in the dark, he’s convinced he’s the reason the sky is falling. He’s a protector who thinks he’s become the threat. And I’m a business owner who knows, with a sinking, visceral certainty, that the only way to save the lodge was to betray the guardian who makes the lodge worth saving.

I don’t follow him. I’d just be another human bringing the noise with me. I go back inside, relishing the warmth of the kitchen. It’s the heartbeat of the house that never stops, even when the rest of the body is in shock. Marge is leaning against the counter, a mug of tea in her hands that she isn’t drinking. She looks older tonight. The fluorescent lights catch the deep lines around her mouth, lines earned from decades of keeping this place from sliding off the mountain.