Page 59 of Wild Thorns

I'd heard it so often now, I'd told myself it was wildlife, because the alternative was a drawer I wasn't ready to open. But this time I was awake and listening, and I just couldn't tell myself that anymore.

It wasn't random. Not scattered and distant, the way animal sounds usually were. It was coordinated, call and response, voices threading together across the dark, purposeful in a way that had nothing to do with wildlife. Like a coordinated hunt, it sounded like a scripted thing, like a language. It sounded like these creatures were saying something to each other, or to something else, out there in the trees.

It went on for a while. Then it stopped.

* * *

At the design studio, I can't focus.

I've been staring at the same logo concept for forty minutes. It's a perfectly reasonable logo. It doesn't deserve this level of hostility. I keep changing the typeface, changing it back and pretending I'm working, which is not the same thing as working, but my brain has other priorities today.

The memory of Jasper's voice is doing laps. I’m running out of reasons not to do this.

"You've got that look again," Lila says, not looking up from her screen.

"I don't have a look."

"You absolutely have a look." She swivels her chair. Studies me with those sharp eyes. "Also, you've changed that font four times. The font was fine."

"I'm workshopping."

"You're workshopping in the direction of someone who didn't sleep, or someone who almost did something interesting and then didn't." She tilts her head. "Which one is it?"

"Those aren't mutually exclusive."

"Oh, interesting." She swivels fully toward me now, arms crossed, expression delighted in the way Lila's expression gets delighted when she senses information she wants. "So something almost happened. Interesting. Very interesting."

"I didn't say—"

"You confirmed it by not denying it fast enough. I know you, Serena. You're very good at redirecting, but only when you're actually prepared to redirect. Right now you're just sitting there looking like someone interrupted a moment you'd been building toward for weeks." A pause, for effect. "Which Voss brother?"

"I really don't know what you're—"

"There are three of them," Lila says, "and they all look at you like you're the only person in the room. Which, in a town this size, is not exactly subtle. We notice things. I notice things." She grins, slow and satisfied. "My money's on Jasper. He's been circling you since day one. Every time you come in here he manages to happen to walk past the window at least once."

I look at my screen. My traitorous face is doing something.

"Uh huh," Lila says.

"I'm not confirming anything."

"You don't have to." She turns back to her work, but she's still smiling; I can hear it in her voice. "For what it's worth, Jasper is a good person. He's annoying, obviously, and he thinks he's funnier than he is, which: he's exactly as funny as he thinks he is, which is the most dangerous kind of funny. But he's good." A pause. "They all are. It's the Voss family curse."

"What is?"

"Being genuinely good people who make everyone around them feel it." She clicks something on her screen. "It's very inconvenient."

I don't answer. I change the font again. The font really doesn't deserve this.

* * *

I take my lunch to the coffee shop because I need the noise and the normalcy of Mel sliding my order across the counter and saying you look tired without any actual concern, the way Mel always does.

"You look tired," Mel says.

"Thanks, Mel."

"Long night?"