The first night alone is the hardest.
Not because I'm scared—though the cottage does make interesting sounds after dark, wood settling and wind testing the eaves like it's looking for weaknesses. Not because I'm sad, exactly, though grief sits in my chest like a stone I've swallowed that won't quite go down.
It's hard because it's quiet.
Growing up, there was always noise. My parents' laughter echoing through whatever apartment we could afford that month, my dad's terrible singing in the shower, my mom's habit of talking to herself while she cooked. Then the accident, and the different kind of noise—social workers and distant relatives and the constant shuffle of temporary places that never quite became home.
Then Elara. Who filled silence with stories and the radio turned low to the classical station and the rhythmic thunk of her knife on the cutting board while she hummed.
Now: nothing.
Just me and the breathing floorboards and a scarf that's warmer than it should be.
I unpack my suitcase—the one that finally arrived despite the shipping company's best efforts to lose it—in the bedroom that used to be mine during summer visits. Twin bed with the iron frame Elara painted white sometime in the eighties. Dresser with the drawer that sticks. Window that looks out over the back garden where she grew herbs that probably weren't all legal.
My clothes look wrong here. Too modern, too bright. Like I'm playing dress-up in someone else's life.
I hang my denim jacket next to one of Elara's old cardigans, and for a moment, they look like they're having a conversation. The cardigan is saying something judgmental about ripped jeans. My jacket is pretending not to care.
"I'm talking to clothes now," I say out loud, just to hear a human voice. "That's healthy."
The house doesn't disagree.
I pull on sleep shorts and the oversized band t-shirt I stole from an ex-boyfriend whose name I've mostly forgotten, then pad barefoot down to the kitchen. The floorboards are cool under my feet, smooth from decades of wear. Elara used to say the house had good bones. I'm starting to understand what she meant—not just structural integrity, but memory. These boards remember her footsteps. They're trying to remember mine.
The scarf is still around my neck. I keep meaning to take it off, but every time I reach for the knot, my hands change their mind. It's not controlling me—at least, I don't think it is. It just feels right, the way some clothes do. Like I've been waiting my whole life to wear it.
I make tea because it's 10 PM and I'm eighteen and I can have caffeine whenever I want. Rebellion, thy name is Earl Grey at an inappropriate hour.
While the kettle boils, I finally look at my phone. Seventeen missed texts. Twelve from Aunt Maeve (escalating from "Just checking in!" to "Scarlett Eleanor Rowan, you answer me right now"), three from Jen asking if I've been murdered yet, two from Jamie apologizing for his mom being "kind of intense."
I text Jen first: Still alive. House hasn't eaten me. Yet.
Her response is immediate: Good. I'd have to avenge you and I look terrible in black.
Me: You literally wore black to the funeral.
Jen: Yeah and I looked TERRIBLE. Like a goth who gave up halfway.
I smile despite myself. This is what I love about Jen—she treats my grief like it's real but not sacred. She doesn't tiptoe around it. She just... exists next to it, making terrible jokes until the weight becomes bearable.
Me: How was your day?
Jen: Mom's boyfriend made meatloaf. It was a hate crime. How are you ACTUALLY?
I stare at the question for a long moment. How am I actually?
Me: Weird. The house is big and small at the same time. I keep expecting Grandma to walk around the corner.
Jen: That's normal. Grief is weird.
Me: Everything is weird. I found her scarf and now I'm wearing it and I can't take it off.
Jen: Like literally can't? Is it cursed? Should I call a priest?
Me: More like I don't WANT to. It feels like she's still here when I wear it.
Jen: Red. Babe. That's really beautiful and also concerning. Promise me you're not going full Miss Havisham?
Me: I promise I will shower and change clothes. Sometimes.
Jen: Good enough. Love you. Call me if the house gets haunted or you get lonely or whatever.
Me: Love you too.
I text Aunt Maeve next: I'm fine. House is fine. Going to bed soon. Talk tomorrow.
Then I silence my phone and set it face-down on the counter, because I'm done being a person that people can reach for tonight.
The kettle screams. I pour water over the tea bag and watch the color bloom, dark and honest. The scarf warms against my throat in response to... what? The heat? My mood? I still don't understand the rules of this thing.
I'm carrying my mug toward the living room when I notice the bookshelf.
It's not new—it's been there forever, stuffed with Elara's collection of paperback mysteries and gardening guides and exactly one copy of a romance novel she always claimed she'd never read but that was suspiciously dog-eared. But something about it looks different tonight.
I set my mug down and crouch in front of it, running my fingers along the spines. Agatha Christie. Mary Stewart. Elizabeth Peters. And then—
My knuckles knock hollow.
I freeze. Knock again, more deliberately. The sound is definitely wrong—not solid wood, but something behind it. A space where there shouldn't be one.
My heart picks up speed. The scarf pulses warm against my skin, like it approves of whatever I'm about to do.
I start pulling books off the shelf, stacking them on the floor. When it's empty, I can see it clearly: the back panel is a different color, slightly warmer. I press my palm flat against it.
It's warm. Like there's breath caught in the wall.
"Okay," I tell the house. "What are you hiding?"
I slide my fingers along the edges of the shelf, looking for a latch or a button or some obvious mechanism. Nothing. Then I try pushing the warm panel, and it gives—just slightly, like a door that's been painted shut but wants to open.
I push harder. The panel slides forward an inch, then sideways, revealing a shallow compartment lined with cedar. The smell that rushes out is sweet and woody and so distinctly Elara that I have to blink back tears.
Inside: a flat bundle wrapped in muslin, tied with string.
My hands are shaking slightly as I pull it out. The fabric is soft with age, yellowed at the creases. I untie the knots carefully, and the muslin falls away to reveal a book.
No—a journal. Ochre cloth cover, the corners blunted by hands that held it often. ELARA is scratched on the front in pencil, like an afterthought.
I sit back on my heels, holding it like it might dissolve if I'm not careful.
This is hers. Her handwriting. Her thoughts, recorded in ink on paper, something she hid carefully enough that I never found it in all my childhood summers here.
The smart thing would be to wait until morning. Make more tea. Sit in good light. Read it carefully, respectfully.
I flip it open right there on the floor.
The handwriting is unmistakably Elara's—that loopy, stubborn script that looks like it's trying to be proper but keeps getting distracted. The ink is blue, faded in places, darker where she pressed harder with emotion.
The first entry is dated fifty-three years ago. She would have been twenty-five, unmarried, teaching at the local elementary school.
I think the woods have a question, and I don't know how to answer it without lying or feeding it too fast.
I smile despite myself. That's so Elara—assuming the woods have agency, have curiosity. Treating them like neighbors instead of scenery.
Tonight I made a rule.
And there it is, boxed in twice, circled once:
Rule Six: Count to thirteen before I say yes to anything beautiful.
"That's not how normal people live, Elara," I mutter. But I keep reading.
---
I was putting bread on the back step—whole wheat, because the foxes prefer it and I prefer to keep them happy—when he whistled.
My breath catches. He.
Not a tune, exactly. A shape. Like the sound was drawing a circle on the air and daring me to step inside it.
The scarf warms significantly. I press my hand to it, grounding myself.
I didn't turn around. Years of living alone teach you that some invitations are tests. Instead, I stood in my kitchen and watched my own hands make tea the way Mama did when she still had her hands and her mind. I carried the cup to the porch—not the back step, the PORCH, because porches have boundaries and back steps are just suggestions—and set it on the railing.
The woods listened. The woods always listen if you set out something hot.
Then I heard his footsteps. Not heavy. Not sneaking. The kind of walk that makes you want to match your breathing to it without realizing you've started.
I'm completely still now, tea forgotten, every bit of my attention locked on these words. This isn't just a journal entry. This is a story. This is important.
I looked. I'm not proud of how quickly I looked, but I did.
Gold eyes. Winter coat that was too heavy for September. Hair that needed a comb and maybe a lecture about scissors. He didn't come up the stairs. He stopped at the bottom like the wood knew a name he didn't.
I felt very foolish for leaving bread. I felt very foolish for wanting him to have it.
My throat is tight. The emotional weight of her words is palpable—I can feel her loneliness, her surprise, her cautious hope. It bleeds through the page like watercolor.
"Evening," I said, like I say to Mr. Cavanaugh when he brings his awful dog to sniff my roses.
He smiled like I'd given him something he'd been trying not to beg for.
"Evening, Elara."
He knew my name. He said it slowly, rolling it in his mouth like hard candy he didn't want to finish. Not like he wanted to own it—like he wanted to keep it from breaking.
I realize I'm holding my breath and force myself to inhale. The scarf is hot now, almost uncomfortable, like it remembers this. Like it was there.
The first howl came from behind him, distant but not distant enough. I'm not easily frightened—I'm a sensible woman who can read weather and wood grain and the space between what people say and what they mean. But I felt the urge to step down one stair, then another, until the porch wasn't between us anymore.
That scared me more than wolves.
So I made a rule. Right there, standing on my porch with a strange man at the bottom of my stairs and howls in my woods. I started counting: one, two, three... and with each number, the wanting belonged to me again instead of to whatever circle he'd drawn with that whistle. By thirteen, I could think clearly.
Count to thirteen before you say yes to anything beautiful.
She made that rule because of him. Because she almost said yes to something—someone—dangerous.
"You shouldn't be out after dark," I told him, slipping into the voice I used when I was teaching, mothering a stranger the way Mama would scold me for mothering men who have their own mothers. "The path isn't safe."
"I'm not on the path," he said, and he was right. He was standing in the space where the lawn becomes woods, where my property line is more suggestion than law.
"You left bread," he added, like this explained his presence.
"We have foxes."
"We do." He didn't blink much. Men who hunt blink less, I've noticed. "But I came for the tea."
I lean back against the bookshelf, processing this. Someone—something—had been coming to Elara's cottage. Someone who knew her name. Who wanted her tea, her bread, her attention.
Someone with gold eyes.
The man from the funeral flashes through my mind. Tall. Still. Gold eyes that caught light like coins.
It can't be the same person, I think. That was fifty-three years ago. He'd be... ancient. Dead.
Unless he wasn't human to begin with.
The thought sits in my stomach like ice.
I keep reading.
---
The second howl answered the first, closer. I didn't step down. He didn't step up. We stood there practicing the discipline of almost—almost speaking, almost touching, almost making the kind of mistake you spend the rest of your life understanding.
He looked at my door like it was something he wanted to learn by heart. Then he put both hands behind his back, as if they had intentions of their own and needed a timeout.
"What do you want?" I asked.
He thought about lying. I could see it in the pause, the way his shoulders shifted. But then he chose honesty, and I forgave him for everything I didn't know yet.
"To look," he said.
That's where I made my second mistake. I said yes without counting.
"Elara," I whisper. "What did you do?"
I didn't step into the yard—the yard is where women become stories. But I leaned against the post Mama painted when I was sixteen, and I tucked my nightgown into my robe like a fighter taping her hands.
"Look at what?" I asked, though I knew. Women always know.
"At you," he said simply.
The porch slats under my feet got warmer, like something underneath the house had just decided to live a little longer.
A chill runs down my spine. The house. She's talking about the house responding to him, to this moment.
"That can be done from there," I said, trying to find my spine again. "And not for long."
"I won't stay."
"Good."
"I will come back."
I counted to thirteen before answering—got my tongue on the number twelve to make sure it didn't run off without me. He watched my mouth like he could hear the counting, like he knew exactly what I was doing and approved.
"No," I said finally. "Do not come back."
He didn't argue. Didn't bargain. He just bowed—old-fashioned, the kind of courtesy that went out of style before I was born—and breathed in deep, like the air at the edge of my porch tasted like something he'd lost.
When the third howl came, even closer, I made my first written rule:
Never step into a ring I didn't draw.
I don't know who he is. I know what his eyes can do—ask questions your body wants to answer before your brain gets a vote. I'll be ready to refuse them again. Thirteen times if I must.
The entry ends there.
I sit in the silence of the living room, my tea long cold, the journal warm in my lap. The scarf has cooled back to a comfortable temperature, but I can still feel it *there*, present and aware in a way fabric shouldn't be.
Elara met someone. Something. Fifty-three years ago, when she was young and alone. She started making rules to protect herself from something beautiful and dangerous that came to her porch asking to look at her.
And I'm wearing the scarf that came from that courtship. Sitting in the house where this happened. Following the same rules she wrote to keep herself safe—or to give herself permission to want safely.
"What am I supposed to do with this information?" I ask the empty room.
The house settles, boards creaking in a way that sounds almost like an answer.
I flip through more pages, scanning dates. The entries aren't daily—sometimes weeks pass between them, sometimes months. But there's a thread running through them all, a story being told in pieces:
He came back. Of course he came back. I told him no and he respected it for exactly three days.
The bread is gone every morning. I pretend not to notice.
Rule Four: Kindness feeds faster than fear. I learned that from Mama, but I'm understanding it differently now.
Tonight he spoke a word I don't know and the floorboards stopped creaking. I should be terrified. Instead, I asked him to teach it to me.
We have an arrangement now: he stays at the tree line, I stay on the porch. We talk about weather and wolves and the kind of history that doesn't make it into books. It's the loneliest thing I've ever done with another person.
Then, dated six months after the first entry:
Three months since I let him come to the porch steps. We have a routine now:
He arrives after sunset. I bring tea. We don't touch. We talk about everything except what we are to each other.
Tonight I asked him why he comes.
"Because you're here," he said, like it was simple.
"I'll always be here," I said. "I'm not leaving this house."
He was quiet for a long time. Then: "Neither am I."
It felt like a vow. It felt like a threat. It felt like the kind of promise you make when you know it's going to cost you everything and you don't care.
Rule Six has never been more important: Count to thirteen. Because if I don't, I'm going to step off this porch and into his arms and probably into teeth I haven't seen yet.
My breath catches. Into teeth I haven't seen yet.
So Elara knew. Knew he wasn't human, wasn't safe. And she let him keep coming anyway.
I flip ahead, hungry for more of the story. An entry dated nearly a year after the first meeting:
He brought me a scarf tonight. Said he found it in the woods, which is a lie because I felt his mother's hands in every stitch.
It's red. Deep, fox-red, the color of desire and warning braided together. The color of the stories that eat girls who wander off paths.
"I can't accept this," I told him.*
"It's not a gift," he said. "It's a door."
"To what?"
"To me. If you want it."
I should have given it back. I put it on instead. It fit like it had been waiting for my throat its entire existence.
He looked at me wearing it and something in him broke and reformed in the same breath. "Elara," he said, and his voice was full of everything we haven't said.
"No," I told him. "Not yet. I'm still counting."
"How high?"
"Higher than you'll wait."
"Try me," he said, smiling with all his teeth for the first time.
I'm wearing it now as I write this. It's warm against my skin. Warmer than it should be. Like it has a heartbeat that isn't mine.
I think I'm in love with something that shouldn't be loved.
I think it's too late to stop.
My hands are trembling. I flip forward, looking for what happened next. Years pass in pages—entries become less frequent but more intense. I see mentions of counting to thirteen thousand. Of touching hands. Of rules broken and remade.
Then I find an entry dated thirty years ago. Elara would have been forty-eight. My mother would have been a baby.
Today I told him no for the last time.
Not because I stopped loving him—God, how I wish it were that simple. But because I'm not young anymore. Because I have a daughter now who will have questions I can't answer if I keep a wolf at my door. Because some stories need to end before they consume everything.
He didn't argue. He never argues. He just asked, "How long?"
"Until she's grown. Until she's safe. Until I'm sure this won't touch her."
"And then?"
I couldn't answer that. We both knew I might not have a 'then.' I'm mortal. He isn't. Time is on his side in every way that matters and none of the ways that hurt.
He took the scarf from around my neck—I'd been wearing it for twenty-three years. I felt naked without it. Unprotected. Like removing armor before a battle.
"Keep it," he said. "For her. When the time comes. If she needs it."
"She won't need it. I won't let her need it."
He smiled sadly. "You can't control what calls to what, Elara. You taught me that."
He left. I watched until the trees took him. The house felt colder than it ever had.
I locked the scarf away. Made new rules—stricter ones, harder ones. Built walls where there used to be porches.
But some nights, when the moon is right and the wind carries his scent, I still count to thirteen.
I always stop at twelve.
I close the journal, my chest aching. That's why the scarf was hidden. Why Elara's rules got stricter. She chose her daughter—my mother—over a love that had already lasted two decades. She chose safety over desire.
And now, fifty-three years after it started, he's back. Not for Elara. For me.
Wearing the scarf she wore for twenty-three years. Living in the house where they courted across a threshold. Following rules she made to protect herself from something she loved too much to fully refuse.
I'm so absorbed in processing this that I almost miss it—the soft tap against the back door.
I freeze, journal still open on my lap. Listen.
Nothing.
Then—tap tap. Deliberate. Knuckles on wood.
It's 11:47 PM. No one knocks this late. Not here, miles from town, with the nearest neighbor a half-mile away and probably asleep.
The scarf warms against my throat. Warning or anticipation, I can't tell.
I should stay here. I should ignore it. I should call... who? Aunt Maeve? The police? Jen?
Instead, I find myself standing. Setting the journal carefully on the couch. Walking toward the back door like I'm watching someone else make this choice.
The kitchen is dark except for the moonlight coming through the window. The door is solid wood—Elara insisted on replacing the one with the window after my parents died, said she didn't like people being able to see in after dark.
Tap.
My hand is on the doorknob before I can talk myself out of it. The metal is cold, grounding. I take a breath, count to three (not thirteen, I'm not that careful), and crack the door open.
The porch is empty.
For a moment, I think I imagined it. Then I look down and see the frost.
It's October, but not cold enough for frost. Not like this. Not in this pattern—a thin, perfect circle drawn on the wooden boards just inside the door frame. Delicate as breath on glass, precise as compass work.
Rule Five: Never step into a ring I didn't draw.
I stare at it. The circle is small, maybe two feet in diameter, centered perfectly on the threshold. It catches the moonlight and glows faintly, like bioluminescence. Like magic.
"No," I say out loud, firm. "Not doing this tonight."
The frost doesn't care. It sits there, patient.
I step back and close the door. Lock it. Rest my forehead against the wood and try to remember how to breathe like a normal person whose grandmother had a fifty-year supernatural romance with something that draws circles out of ice.
Behind me, my phone buzzes on the counter. I nearly jump out of my skin.
It's Jen: You still alive?
Me: Define alive.
Jen: Red. What's wrong?
I stare at the phone. How do I explain this? How do I say "I think the creature that loved my grandmother for fifty years is now interested in me" without sounding like I've lost my mind?
Me: Nothing. Just spooked myself reading old journals.
Jen: Want me to come over? I can be there in 20.
God, I love her. But no. This is something I need to figure out myself. Something that feels private in a way I don't have words for yet.
Me: I'm okay. Going to bed soon. Talk tomorrow?
Jen: If you die in a creepy cottage I'm going to be so mad at you.
Me: Noted. Love you.
Jen: Love you too, weirdo.
I check the back door lock again. It's secure. The frost circle is still there, visible through the crack at the bottom of the door—a thin line of silver in the darkness.
"Neighbor," I say, remembering Rule Three. Answer like a neighbor: kind, firm, brief. "I'm reading. Not tonight."
Nothing responds. But I swear the temperature in the kitchen shifts, like something that was pressing close has decided to give me space.
I grab Elara's journal, my cold tea, and retreat to my bedroom. Lock that door too, which is probably pointless but makes me feel better. I pile pillows behind my back and pull the quilt up to my waist, creating a nest of false security.
The scarf is still around my neck. I'm definitely sleeping in it. That's fine. That's a completely normal thing to do.
I open the journal again, looking for more. There are scattered entries over the years—brief mentions of glimpses in the woods, howls in the distance, bread that appeared and disappeared. But nothing sustained until an entry dated five years ago.
He came back today.
My daughter is gone—God, Lily, my beautiful girl, taken by the same woods that gave me love. I thought I'd made her safe. I thought the rules would protect her. But wolves are wolves, even the ones who smile and bow and promise restraint.
He stood at the tree line. Didn't come closer. Just stood there while I screamed at him, accused him, blamed him for everything even though I know—I KNOW—he wasn't responsible. The pack that killed her was feral, unaligned. But they were his KIND.
When I ran out of words, he said: "I'm sorry."
Two words. Fifty years of silence, and that's what he offers.
"Are you?" I asked.
"Yes."
"Will you leave?"
"No. She'll need me."
"Who?"
"Your granddaughter. Lily's daughter. When she comes here, when she's old enough, when she understands—she'll need someone who remembers what it means to count to thirteen."
"Stay away from her."
"I can't." He looked at me with those impossible eyes. "She'll wear the scarf, Elara. You know she will. And when she does, I'll know. I'll come. Because that's what it means—what it's always meant. A door. To me."
I wanted to burn the scarf right there. But I couldn't. It's too much of her, too much of us, too much of the only thing I ever built that didn't crumble.
So I hid it instead. And I wrote her rules. Hoping she'd be smarter than I was.
Hoping she'd make it to thirteen.
My hands have gone numb. The scarf against my throat burns like a brand.
He knew. He's known for five years that I would eventually wear this. That it would call to him. That he'd come back—not for Elara, but for me.
And I put it on anyway.
It's not a gift, he'd told her. It's a door.
I close the journal because my hands are shaking and my eyes are burning and I'm not ready to know what else Elara wrote in those final years.
I turn off the light and slide down into the pillows, pulling the quilt up to my chin. The scarf stays on. Obviously. Even knowing what it means, I can't take it off.
Sleep should be impossible, but exhaustion is a tide, and I'm drowning in it. My eyes close. My breathing slows.
Just before I fall under completely, I hear it:
Soft. Distant. Patient.
A howl.
It's not threatening. It's not urgent. It's waiting. Like someone who's already waited fifty years and can wait a little longer. Like someone who knows you'll eventually have to come outside, and they're comfortable enough to sit there until you do.
"Thirteen," I mumble into my pillow. "I'm counting to thirteen."
The howl doesn't answer. It doesn't have to.
I dream of frost circles and gold eyes and a woman who looked like me but older, braver, who stood on a porch and counted herself safe from desire one number at a time.
I dream of her stopping at twelve.
Every single time.
---
When I wake up, there's frost on the outside of my window, even though it's not nearly cold enough for that. It's arranged in patterns that look almost like words, like someone was trying to write me a message but didn't know the alphabet.
The scarf is still warm around my neck.
And on my nightstand, where I definitely didn't put it, is a piece of bread wrapped in a cloth napkin. Whole wheat, slightly stale, the kind I watched Elara make a thousand times.
A gift. Or a reminder. Or a promise kept across decades.
Kindness feeds faster than fear.
I pick it up, and it's still warm from hands I didn't see.
"Okay," I tell the empty room, my voice rough with sleep and decisions I'm not ready to make. "I see how this is going to be."
The house breathes around me, boards settling, and somewhere in the distance, the forest starts its morning conversation—birds and wind and the sound of something walking away through leaves, its business here done for now.
I get up. I make coffee. I put the bread in a drawer because I don't know what else to do with an offering from something that's been waiting for me since before I was born.
And I start planning. Because if I'm going to stay in this house—and I am, I'm definitely staying—I need to understand the rules.
All of them.
Even the ones Elara didn't write down because she was too busy counting to thirteen and stopping at twelve.
Especially those.