The forest doesn't believe in boundaries. It never has.
I can feel it pressed against the chapel windows like an uninvited guest, all twisted birch bark and pine needles, pretending to be reverent while eavesdropping on our grief. Inside, the air is thick with the scent of lilies—flowers Grandma Elara hated because they gave her migraines—and that industrial lemon disinfectant that funeral homes use to mask the smell of death with the smell of fake sunshine.
I stand beside her coffin, hands clasped in front of me, trying not to breathe too deeply. Because if I breathe too deeply, if I let my guard down for even a second, I'll start seeing too much.
The colors.
They've been with me since I was seven years old—these impossible tints that bleed off people when their emotions run hot enough. Aunt Maeve, standing three feet to my left in her perfectly pressed black dress, is radiating gold today. Not the warm, honey kind. The metallic, too-bright kind that screams I'm concerned while thinking about property values and real estate agents named Blake.
My cousin Jamie keeps flashing green—that particular shade of hopeful greed that shows up when people start mentally redecorating houses that don't belong to them yet. Old Mr. Cavanaugh has a stubborn blue bruise hanging around his shoulders like a coat he forgot to take off, the kind of grief that's grown comfortable in its own ache.
I can't turn it off. Never could.
If I stare at someone too long, the colors don't just hover around them like auras in those new-age books—they step away, like shadows gaining substance. They pace the aisles, rub their eyes, whisper all the things their owners' mouths are too polite to say.
The pastor clears his throat, and a wave of silver rolls off him—nerves wrapped in duty, the color of a man who's said these same words at too many funerals. "We gather today to honor Elara Rowan, who lived a life full of—"
"—ugly lace and flowers she hated," I mutter under my breath.
Aunt Maeve's perfectly manicured hand shoots out to squeeze my elbow, tuning me like a radio that won't quite find the right station. Her gold flares brighter. "Scarlett," she hisses, her voice dripping with that particular honey-coated warning that wealthy relatives have perfected over generations. "Not now, sweetheart."
"It's Red." I don't look at her. "Grandma called me Red. And she didn't like lilies. They gave her migraines. Gave. Past tense. Because she's dead."
I know I should stop talking. I can feel the collective disapproval of the congregation pressing against my back like a physical weight. But grief makes me mean, and I've never been good at swallowing words that taste like lies.
Aunt Maeve's grip tightens. "We just want what's best for you, darling. You know that."
"What's best for me," I say, finally turning to meet her eyes, "is not being sold off like a toaster oven at a yard sale."
Her gold edges go crisp, sharp enough to cut. I watch as her emotional double—that translucent copy that peels away when feelings get loud enough—cocks a hip and preens. Even her colors are smug.
"No one is selling you," she says, each word carefully measured. "We're talking about the cottage. You're eighteen years old. Alone. First your parents, now Elara—"
"Say my family's names like they died to make your point one more time." I bare my teeth in what could generously be called a smile. "See what happens."
Jamie whistles under his breath and suddenly becomes very interested in his shoes. His violet—annoyance and embarrassment mixed together—flares and sulks.
The pastor soldiers on, talking about ashes and peace and God's greater plan, but I'm no longer listening. My attention has drifted to the windows, to the way the pine needles tap against the glass like they're keeping time to a song only they can hear. This town has always treated the woods as background scenery, pretty set dressing for their Instagram posts and weekend hikes.
They're wrong.
The forest is an audience. It has opinions. And right now, it's watching.
A baby starts crying in the back row—a thin, desperate wail that cuts through the organ music. The young mother's panic flares red, splashing against my consciousness like warm paint. Before I can think better of it, I pull a little blue from the air around me—the cool-sad kind, the color of quiet lullabies and gentle hands—and breathe it toward the baby.
It's not mind control. At least, I don't think it is. More like... emotional weather manipulation. A suggestion in the key of comfort.
The baby hiccups once, twice, and falls silent. The mother looks around for her miracle worker, her face slack with relief, and never sees me standing in the front row with my hands still folded, my face carefully blank.
Grandma would tell me not to play with strangers' feelings. She had rules about that—rules about a lot of things, actually. But Grandma also left me a house with floorboards that breathe like living things and a path that goes places the map doesn't acknowledge, so I figure I'm allowed to ignore at least one of her rules today.
After the hymn—some depressing thing about valleys and shadows—the casserole brigade waddles up the aisle disguised as relatives bearing sympathy cards and Tupperware.
Uncle Dan claps me on the shoulder like I'm a member of his bowling team. "Sell the place, Red," he says, his voice booming with false cheer. "Market's hot right now. That old cottage is a money pit waiting to happen."
"Good thing I enjoy exercise," I say sweetly. "We'll get along great."
"But the taxes—" Aunt Maeve starts.
"I can read numbers." I tilt my head, letting my gaze unfocus just enough to see her emotional double more clearly. "Can you read your own aura? It's screaming 'I already promised the kitchen renovation to a contractor named Blake who gives me wine at the country club.'"
She blinks rapidly, her gold flickering. "What are you—"
"Nothing," I say, smiling. "Just talking to myself. Grief, you know. Makes you say strange things."
People take turns handing me cards with doves on them, as if grief is something you can feed with Hallmark sentiments and casseroles. My best friend Jen texts: Are you breathing?
I send back a selfie with my face arranged in what I hope resembles human emotion. She responds with three middle finger emojis and a heart. That's friendship.
They try again at the graveside, when the earth looks like an open wound and the forest has front-row seats. The wind pushes my hair across my face, and I taste metal in the air—rain, maybe, or something older.
The colors here are different. Heavier. Black hangs over the grave like a blanket trying to smother everything underneath, that terrible blank-nothing of death and endings. But green already knits along the edges, stubborn as weeds, the we-go-on persistence of life that refuses to quit.
"Red." Aunt Maeve's voice has gone gentler, which somehow makes it worse. "You are so, so strong. But you can't keep that house alone. It's out by the timberline, miles from town. No neighbors. Those stairs are murder on the knees, and the roof—"
"I'll fix it," I interrupt.
"With what? YouTube videos and hope?"
"With my hands." I straighten my spine, feeling something hard and bright and Elara-shaped settling into my bones. "With YouTube, yes. With stubbornness. With whatever Grandma left in those labeled coffee cans in the pantry."
"Scarlett, be serious—"
"I am being serious. That house is mine." I don't say the rest—that it's the only place left with my parents' laughter still echoing in the walls, with Elara's tea stains on the kitchen sink, with memories that haven't been sanitized and packed away in cardboard boxes. "She wanted me to have it."
"You don't know what she wanted," Uncle Dan mutters, but his voice lacks conviction.
"Yes, I do." I tap my backpack, where her will is folded with a paperclip bite on the corner and her handwriting all over the margins. Notes like Keep the porch. It keeps the wolves off. Everyone laughed at that line when the lawyer read it aloud. Everyone thought it was a joke, a quirky bit of Elara humor.
I didn't laugh. I don't think it was a joke.
The pastor nods at me expectantly. Time for the granddaughter's speech—they want something sweet about pie crusts and warm hugs, something that will make everyone feel better about the fact that an eighty-three-year-old woman died alone in a cottage by the woods.
I can't do sweet. Not today. I do honest.
"She talked to the forest," I say, my voice carrying across the assembled mourners. "You all know that. You called it 'quaint' when you thought she couldn't hear. I call it brave. You don't talk to something unless it talks back."
I can feel the ripple of discomfort move through the crowd. Silver prickles on people's collars—fear dressed up as common sense, that particular shade of unease that modern people feel when confronted with things that don't fit in their carefully ordered worldview.
"Elara wasn't crazy." I look past them, to the trees. The trees look back. "She was loud enough for the woods to hear. That takes courage, not senility."
"Red," Aunt Maeve hisses, her face flushing.
But I'm not done. I reach out and brush my fingers against the coffin. The wood is warm from sunlight—or maybe from something else, something I don't have words for. The colors around my hand explode like fireworks: blue for the ache that won't quite heal, green for the love that refuses to be evicted, and a thin filament of gold for the spine she built in me piece by piece, like furniture she refused to throw away even when it was unfashionable.
When I look up, every clock face on every phone in the vicinity has stopped at 12:13.
The moment stretches, taffy-thick. No one breathes. Even the wind holds still, like the world itself is waiting for permission to continue.
Then the second hand jumps, and everyone shakes themselves like dogs coming out of a lake. They mutter about poor cell reception in the cemetery, about cheap phones and software glitches. They'll convince themselves it was nothing.
I know better.
We shovel dirt. We say the words. We pretend this ritual makes us feel better about death. It doesn't.
Back at the chapel hall, casseroles breed on long folding tables under fluorescent lights that make everyone look like corpses. Someone has made a trifle that looks like a geography lesson gone wrong—layers of cake and pudding and whipped cream that definitely violate some kind of food safety code.
I take a paper plate and a corner chair and practice the art of ignoring advice. Advice arrives anyway, dressed in black and carrying Tupperware.
"You're a smart girl," Aunt Maeve says, materializing beside me with a plate of cookies I won't eat. "University applications—"
"Are in," I cut her off.
"Scholarships—"
"Working on them."
"The cottage—"
"Stays."
Her gold double folds its arms in a perfect mirror of annoyance. My own emotional shadow—yes, I have one too—stares them down and pops imaginary gum.
"You can't live alone, sweetheart," Maeve says, and her voice has gone soft with something that might actually be concern.
"I've done it before," I say quietly, and the room remembers my parents without anyone saying their names. The blue that settles over us is the kind that never quite dries, the color of old grief that's learned to be furniture instead of a guest.
A man I barely recognize—one of Uncle Dan's golf buddies, probably—leans over with a condescending smile. "Young lady, you need a male head of household. For safety."
I look at him for a long moment, long enough to see his gold for what it is—pride that's never been tested, confidence that came free with his birth certificate. "The wolves respect me more than you do," I say flatly.
He laughs like a drain backing up. He stops when he sees my face hasn't changed, when he realizes I'm not joking.
I escape outside before I make a scene I'll replay at 3 AM for the next decade, before I say something that can't be unsaid at my grandmother's funeral.
The cold slaps my cheeks, welcome and sharp. The birches crowd close, all ribs and pale bark and the kind of beauty that looks fragile but isn't. The path down to the stream flickers between the trunks like a pale vein.
The forest is listening.
The forest is always listening.
I lean against the stone wall and let it.
"You can all stop waiting," I tell the birches, because talking to trees is apparently hereditary in my family. "I'm not selling her house. I'm not leaving."
A jay screams what sounds like a curse word. Leaves skitter across the pavement. Somewhere in the distance, water argues with rocks in a language I almost understand.
Something changes.
It's subtle, the kind of shift you feel in your bones before your brain catches up. The posture of the woods rearranges itself, the way a room full of people turns when someone important walks in. My skin knows it first—that prickling awareness of being watched, not by trees, but by something that knows what watching means.
The colors inside me respond automatically, rearranging like cards being shuffled by an invisible hand. My red—my emotional core, the pilot light of my personality—quickens, brightens. My gold squares its shoulders. My silver lays a careful finger to her lips.
Careful, she whispers. Count.
I don't turn toward the shadow at the edge of the cemetery. Not yet. I let it be there. I let myself feel it—that weight of attention, patient and pressing and the kind of focused that makes big things feel small and small things feel enormous.
When I finally lift my head, he's half-hidden behind a birch tree.
Tall. Still. Too still, the way wild animals are still when they're deciding whether you're prey or competition. The coat is wrong for spring—too heavy, too dark. The hair is wrong for a man who doesn't want to be noticed—too long, catching the wind.
And the eyes—
Not human. Not in this light. Gold, like old coins, like autumn leaves backlit by flame, like every warning fairy tale your grandmother ever told you about not trusting beautiful things in the woods.
We don't speak.
He doesn't move, except to breathe. Even that seems calculated, measured. A thin wind threads between us, carrying the scent of mint and iron and something else—something wild and clean and dangerous.
"Scarlett!" Aunt Maeve's voice cuts through the moment like scissors through silk.
His gold eyes flick toward the sound, then back to me. Sharp. Assessing. The colors inside me tilt toward him like flowers following the sun, an involuntary magnetism that has nothing to do with logic and everything to do with that animal part of me that recognizes another predator when I see one.
He tips his head—just once, a movement so slight I might have imagined it. It could be a promise. It could be a memory. It could be a threat wrapped in courtesy.
Then he disappears.
Not walks away—disappears. One moment he's there, solid and real and impossible to ignore. The next, he's folded himself back into the birch bark and shadows so cleanly it feels like a magic trick, like the world itself practiced the illusion until it was perfect.
I stand there until my hands go numb from the cold.
"Fine," I tell the forest, which is definitely eavesdropping and definitely pretending it isn't. "You win. I'll talk back."
The wind lifts the hair at my nape like fingers.
Far off, so distant it might be imagination, a wolf howls—soft and patient, like a word that won't be rushed.
Like someone calling a name they already know I'll answer.
-to be continued in chapter 2-