Page 51 of The Girl Who Cried Bigfoot

I drop the phone onto the desk and let out a breath I feel like I’ve been holding since the storm started. My hands are shaking. I look at the screen, at the face of the man I’m currently deleting from history. I am turning Rowan into a line item. I am making him Rowan Smith, a phantom dressed in silicone and carbon fiber.

It’s a perfect plan. It accounts for the rescue, the witnesses, the footage, and the financial pressure. It gives the documentary crew a face-saving exit and gives Rowan his forest back. But it also creates a wall. If he’s a suit, he can never truly be seen. If he’s a hoax, he has to stay in the shadows forever, even from me.

I walk back into the mudroom. The back door is still open, the darkness of the woods pressing in against the lodge. I want to run out there. I want to find him and tell him that I’ve fixed it. I want to tell him that I’ve built a lie big enough to hide him forever.

But I know how guardians are. He doesn’t want a lie. By making him the biggest story in the country, even a fake one, I’ve tied him to me in a way that might be more suffocating than the drones ever were.

I pick up his HIDE & SEEK T-shirt. It’s cold and wet. I press it to my face, catching the faint, lingering scent of him—something like honey, old wood, and the electric charge of a storm.

“I’m sorry,” I whisper into the fabric.

I walk back into the office and begin the final step. I pull up the lodge’s social media accounts, which started this whole mess, and prepare the first post. It’s not a debunking yet. It’s a teaser. A photo of the prototype sketch Toby emailed me, cropped so it looks like a design document.

Caption: Everything you thought you saw was just the beginning. Stay tuned for the real story behind the Guardian.

I hit post. The red light on the hotline phone blinks once, twice, and then goes solid as a new wave of calls starts to flood in. The internet is a swarm of bees, and I’ve just thrown the first bucket of honey.

I sit there in the blue light, a forger at the end of her masterpiece, and wait for the world to start believing my lies. The mountain is silent. The lodge is humming. And for the first time in weeks, I know exactly what I’m doing. I just don’t know if I’ll ever be able to look Rowan in the eye again once I’ve finished making him disappear.

28

WREN

LADIES AND GENTLEMEN, WE FAKED A CRYPTID

The screen of my laptop is a cold, blue rectangular eye, watching me as I systematically dismantle a miracle. It’s three in the morning, the hour when the silence of the lodge stops being peaceful and starts feeling like a heavy wool blanket pressed over my face. I’ve spent the last six hours building a digital cage of wireframes, falsified invoices, and technical jargon. Every click of my mouse is a nail in the coffin of the truth.

I hit refresh on the lodge’s main social media feed. The teaser image I posted—the cropped, coffee-stained sketch of a pneumatic leg rig—is already a wildfire. It has four thousand shares and a comment thread that’s growing faster than I can read. The top comment, with eight hundred likes, is a single word in all caps: DEBUNKED?

I don’t answer yet. A master forger knows that the reveal needs to feel like a discovery, not a confession. I let them speculate. I let them argue about the torque of the servos and the density of the silicone. I’m giving them exactly what they want: a way to feel smart for being fooled.

The office door creaks open. I don’t jump, mostly because my nerves are fried into a dull, humming static. Marge stands there in her thick flannel robe, holding two mugs of tea. She doesn’t ask if I’m okay. She just sets the mug down next to my mouse and looks at the screen. The steam from the tea smells like peppermint and survival.

“You’re making him a ghost, Wren,” she says quietly. Her voice is rough with sleep and something that sounds like mourning.

“I’m making him safe,” I say. My voice sounds thin, like paper being torn. “They have 4K footage of him carrying a man through a mudslide like it was a light stroll. If I don’t give them a suit to believe in, they’ll bring back a battalion with tranquilizer darts.”

Marge sighs, a long sound that seems to vibrate through the floorboards. “He won’t thank you for this. A Guardian doesn’t like being a character in a play.”

“He doesn’t have to thank me. He just has to stay in the forest where nobody’s looking for him anymore.” I take a sip of the tea. It’s hot enough to scald my tongue, which is a welcome distraction from the weight in my chest. “I’m deleting the man to save the species, Marge. It’s art history 101. If you want to hide a masterpiece, you paint a mediocre landscape over it.”

She looks at me for a long beat, her eyes tired but sharp. “Just make sure you don’t lose the original under all that paint.” She turns and walks out, the soft scuff of her slippers fading down the hall. I’m left alone with the blue light and the lie.

I open my email and pull up the draft I’ve been refining for Sarah Vance. It’s a confession from the Cassidy Lodge management. It details the “Guardian Project”—a two-year marketing initiative designed to revitalize the Cascades’s tourism sector through a high-fidelity, interactive cryptid experience. I’ve attached the fabricated contract for “Rowan Smith,” a fictional park ranger with a background in high-altitude endurance athletics. I even found a stock photo of a guy who looks vaguely like a blurry version of Rowan if you squint and add ten years of life-regret to his eyes.

I attach the files Toby Richter sent over an hour ago. He’s a genius. He’s sent photos of half-finished clay molds and buckets of textured fur. He even included a video of a mechanical hand twitching on a workbench. It’s perfect. It’s professional. It’s the kind of high-level competence that an executive at Aethelgard will see and immediately translate into a “marketing triumph” headline.

I hit send. The sound of the outgoing mail is like a guillotine blade dropping.

Ten minutes later, my phone vibrates. It’s Sarah. I don’t answer. I let it go to voicemail. I want her to stew in the “truth” I’ve just handed her. I want her to realize that she isn’t a failure who got tricked by a monster but a visionary who discovered the greatest guerrilla marketing campaign in the history of the Pacific Northwest.

The sun is a pale, bruised sliver on the horizon when the first press inquiry hits my inbox. By nine o’clock, the Bigfoot Hotline is ringing so relentlessly that I have to unplug the base station. The digital dashboard on my laptop is a sea of red. The mainstream media has picked up the “Hoax of the Century” angle. CNN is running a crawler. Buzzfeed has a listicle of “10 Times We Actually Thought Bigfoot Was Real (And Why the Cassidy Suit Fooled Us All).”

It’s working. The tide is turning with a speed that is both satisfying and terrifying. The casual tourists, the ones who came for the thrill of the hunt, are already canceling their bookings. They don’t want to see a man in a suit. They want magic. And once the magic is explained by a wireframe diagram and an invoice for thirty pounds of silicone, the mystery evaporates like morning mist.

I walk out onto the porch, the air crisp and smelling of damp earth. The parking lot is still half-full, but the energy has shifted. The guys in the tactical gear with the thermal cameras and the serious expressions are standing by their SUVs, looking at their phones. Their EMF meters are holstered. They look like kids who just found out Santa Claus is actually a guy named Dave from accounting.

One of the hikers Rowan rescued, a guy named Mark who’s still hobbling around on a walking cast, is standing on the other end of the porch, a small group of hardcore believers huddled around him. I catch a fragment of his voice as I walk to the gift shop.