Page 1

1

ZOEY

Icross state lines under a name that isn't mine, in a car that isn't registered to me, carrying a phone that isn't the one Ava keeps blowing up. Somewhere behind me, past four hours of interstate and two hours of nothing but pine and switchbacks, is a life that stopped feeling like mine the moment a stranger's hand closed around my wrist backstage.

I don't look in the rearview mirror much anymore. Habit, now. I watch the road instead, the mile markers, the way the light changes as the highway climbs.

By the time the GPS tells me I've arrived, the sun sits low enough to turn the mountainside the color of a struck match. Whole slopes of maple and birch have gone orange and rust-red. No security detail cleared this road. No fan account geotagged this turnoff. As far as the internet is concerned, Zoey Milano vanished sometime around Labor Day and hasn't been seen since.

Good. Let them wonder.

The cabin sits at the end of a gravel drive, wood-sided and modest, with a porch that sags pleasantly at one corner and a stone chimney that looks like it was built by someone who actually knew how. An older woman waits on the steps, silver hair pinned loosely back, a cardigan the color of moss pulled tight against the evening chill.

"You must be Ms. Carter," she says, and there's not a flicker of recognition in her face, not even the polite kind people fake when they already know exactly who you are. "I'm Yvonne. I own the place."

"Nice to meet you." I climb out, legs stiff from the drive, and make myself hold eye contact instead of scanning the treeline the way I've been doing at every gas station since Sacramento. "Thank you for having me on such short notice."

"Mountain doesn't run on notice." Yvonne's eyes crinkle. "Runs on whoever needs it most that week."

Something about the way she says it makes me wonder, just for a second, if she knows more than she's letting on. But she's already reaching for one of my bags, waving off my protest, and the moment passes.

Inside, the cabin smells of cedar and old woodsmoke. A stone fireplace, open shelving instead of cabinets, windows on three sides framing the forest like something out of a painting nobody staged. No blackout curtains. No panic button wired into the wall. Just glass and trees and wind moving through branches that haven't been trimmed for anyone's sightline but the birds'.

"Bedroom's through there. Bathroom's been redone, so don't let the outside fool you." Yvonne sets my bag down by the stairs. "Cell service is spotty past the ridge, but there's a landline if you ever need it, and I'm only a mile down the road if the quiet gets to be too much."

"I think the quiet is exactly what I'm here for."

She studies me for a moment, and there's something knowing in it, something that feels less like nosiness and more like recognition. "That's what most of them say," she says gently. "The ones who really need this place."

She leaves not long after, promising eggs and firewood by morning, and then I'm alone.

No hotel staff on the other side of a locked door. No car idling outside with a driver checking his mirrors every ninety seconds. Just me, four walls that aren't mine, and a silence so complete I can hear my own pulse in my ears.

It should feel peaceful. For a while, it does.

I unpack slowly, hanging flannel shirts I bought specifically for this trip in a closet that has probably never held anything so deliberately unglamorous. I find the kitchen light switch, the one uneven floorboard by the hearth, the exact spot on the porch where the boards don't creak. Old instincts, cataloging exits and sightlines without my permission. Ben would be proud. Ben would also hate every single thing about this arrangement — the isolation, the lack of a perimeter, the fact that my only neighbor for miles is a seventy-two-year-old woman with a landline.

I push the thought away and light the lamp by the window instead.

That's when I feel it.

Not a sound. Nothing so obvious as footsteps or a snapping branch. Just a pressure at the back of my neck, the particular awareness of being watched for eighteen months of paparazzi and one very bad night backstage trained into me like a second nervous system. I go still, lamp cord still in hand, and look out toward the trees.

Nothing. Just the dark line of pines black against a sky gone the color of a bruise.

"You're being paranoid," I say out loud, because sometimes hearing my own voice helps. "There's no story here. There's no one here."

I believe it enough to finish plugging in the lamp. I do not believe it enough to sit with my back to the window.

2

KELLAN

The tire tracks are the first thing I check, before the sun's even fully up.

They cut off the main road about a quarter mile before Yvonne's gravel drive, tucked into a pull-off that nobody uses this time of year unless they're lost or they're looking for something. I crouch beside the impression left in the mud and measure it against memory. Wider tread than Yvonne's truck. Newer than anything the Hawthornes drive. Not a hunter's rig.

I follow the tracks on foot for a while, out toward the ridge that overlooks the cabin, and that's where I catch it. Cigarette smoke, faint, gone stale in the cold morning air, and under it something sharper. Cologne, maybe, or the particular chemical smell of a phone charger left running too long. Human, and not from around here.