Page 53 of The Girl Who Cried Bigfoot

I don’t have an answer for her. I head back out, driven by a restless, gnawing anxiety that no amount of financial security can soothe. I follow the trail toward the creek, the same one where Rowan lifted me over the mud just weeks ago. I look for a sign—a footprint too large for a man, a broken branch at a height no hiker could reach, a single golden jar of honey left on a stump.

The woods remain stubbornly, devastatingly ordinary. The ferns are just ferns. The trees are just trees. I have successfully demystified his home, stripped away the veil of the supernatural, and replaced it with the mundane certainty of a Rowan Smith in a silicone suit. I have given the world a cover story, and in doing so, I have perhaps given Rowan the ultimate reason to never show his face to me again. The plan has worked with a surgical, terrifying precision, leaving the lodge standing and my heart a total wreck. I stand at the edge of the creek, watching the water rush over the stones, and realize that for all my competence, I have no idea how to find a man who had been faked out of existence.

29

ROWAN

PROTECTED HABITAT, OFFICIALLY

The moss on the north side of the shelter is damp enough to leave a green stain on my palm. I sit with my back against the rough cedar planks, watching the light change across the valley. For three days, I have stayed here, away from the hive and the house, letting the mountain settle. The air is thinner at this elevation, colder. It smells like snow that hasn’t fallen yet and the sharp, clean scent of drying needles.

I have spent centuries watching humans treat this forest like a resource or a stage. They come to take the timber, or to take photos, or to take the thrill of being scared by something they don’t understand. I expected Wren Cassidy to be the same. I expected the hotline to be the final insult before the mountain pushed back. I was prepared for the greed, the noise, and the inevitable betrayal of a secret I never asked her to keep.

I was not prepared for the silence that followed the storm. The drones are gone. The tactical SUVs have cleared the gravel lot, their tires throwing stones as they fled toward the highway. The internet, that invisible swarm she once described as a permanent record, has turned its back. They call me a man in a suit. They call the rescue a stunt. They have stripped the miracle from the ridge and replaced it with the mundane comfort of a hoax.

I should be relieved. This is the peace I demanded from her when the ring lights first arrived. It is the anonymity my species has survived on for longer than the Cassidy family has owned a deed. But as I sit here, the silence feels heavy. It feels like a debt I didn’t realize she was paying on my behalf.

The media buyout collapsed this morning. I heard the shift in the woods—the lack of celebratory noise, the way the tension in the lodge didn’t snap but simply ebbed away into a dull, flat exhaustion. The lump sum she needed to clear the debt is gone because a documentary about a hoax is worth only a fraction of a documentary about a monster. She chose the hoax. She chose to look like a liar to the world so I could look like nothing at all.

I touch the fabric of the shirt she gave me, the one with the champion of a game I have played since before her great-great-grandmother named me. It is dry now. It smells like her—the soap she uses that shouldn’t belong in the woods, and the faint, persistent scent of old paper and lodge dust. I have viewed humans as weather for a very long time. Something that happens to the land, something to be endured until the sun comes back out.

Wren is not the weather. She is the person who stands in the rain and tells the storm to go somewhere else. She ruined her reputation and financial safety net to ensure I could go back to being a ghost. The cost of that is a weight I can feel in my own ribs, a constriction that has nothing to do with my Guardian skin and everything to do with the woman who is currently standing at the edge of the creek, looking for a man she thinks she’s erased.

I stand up. My joints pop in the quiet air. I don’t transform. I don’t need the bark or the height to reach her. I move down the trail, my boots hitting the soft earth with a rhythm I don’t bother to hide. I want her to hear me coming. I want the mountain to stop holding its breath.

I find her near the water. She looks smaller than I remember, her shoulders hunched against a wind that isn’t particularly cold. She’s staring at the stones in the creek as if they might give her an answer. She looks exhausted, the kind of tired that doesn’t go away with a night of sleep, but the kind that comes from carrying a house on your back and realizing the roof is still leaking.

“You’re standing in a draft,” I say. My voice, unused for days, sounds rough to my own ears.

She jumps, spinning around so fast she nearly loses her footing on the wet bank. Her eyes are wide, searching my face as if she’s checking to see if I’m real or just another part of the hoax she’s sold to the public. She doesn’t move toward me. She just stands there, her hands shoved deep into her jacket pockets.

“Rowan,” she breathes. My name sounds like a benediction from her lips. “I thought you’d be gone. Deep old growth. Moving to the Olympics. Somewhere without a signal.”

“I thought about it,” I say, stopping a few feet away. The distance feels like an ocean. “The peace is very quiet. Almost too quiet.”

She looks down at the ground, kicking a loose pebble into the water. “I fixed it. Mostly. The documentary crew left an hour ago. Sarah Vance thinks I’m a marketing genius and a pathological liar. The internet thinks you’re a guy named Rowan Smith in a silicone suit. You’re officially fake news.”

“I heard,” I say. “I also heard about the money. The buyout. You let it go.”

She shrugs, a quick, jerky motion that doesn’t hide the tension in her neck. “It was dirty money. Besides, art history degrees are great for identifying forgeries. I just didn’t think I’d be the one making them. The lodge will be fine. Marge is making budget soups, and the bank is willing to give us a loan. We’ll survive. We always do.”

“You shouldn’t have had to choose,” I say. I move closer, closing the gap until I can see the faint smudge of ink on her thumb. “You protected my territory. You protected me. At the expense of everything you were trying to build.”

Wren looks up then, her jaw set in that stubborn line I’ve come to recognize as her primary defense mechanism. “I wasn’t going to let them put you in a cage, Rowan. Digital or otherwise. I’m the one who started the fire. It was my job to put it out. I just... I didn’t know if you’d want to be around the person who turned you into a punchline.”

“I’ve been a punchline for a long time,” I say. “I prefer it to being a specimen. But that isn’t why I’m here.”

She tilts her head, her eyes narrowing. “Then why are you here? There aren’t any drones to swat down today. No tourists with ring lights. You could be halfway to Canada by now.”

I look at her, really look at her. Her hair is tangling in the breeze, and her eyes are locked on mine even though she’s clearly terrified of what I might say. I think about the trail shelter and the way she felt in my arms when the world was falling apart outside. I think about the silence of my house and how it doesn’t feel like a sanctuary anymore. It just feels like a box.

“I spent a long time thinking my job was to protect the mountain from people,” I say. “And for a few centuries, it was. But I realized something while I was sitting up there watching you lie to the world.”

“What’s that?” she asks. Her voice is a whisper now, barely audible over the rush of the creek.

“That I was wrong about the boundaries,” I say. I reach out, my hand hovering near her face before I settle it on her shoulder. Her skin is warm through the jacket. “This isn’t just about the timber or the hives. It’s about the person who keeps the gate.”

I take a breath, the cold air filling my lungs. I’ve never been good at speeches. I’ve never had to be. But the words from the ridge, the ones I couldn’t finish when the guilt was still fresh, finally feel right.