Rosalee had already told him not to run ahead. Twice — and Rory had ignored her both times, slipping beneath a fallen birch, bounding through underbrush with the reckless grace of something that had never met consequence. Despite herself, she admired the way he moved. He belonged in motion.
She followed, careful but steady, as they pressed north through the woods behind the farmhouse. They’d been there only days, but the forest already pulled at them — deeper than it looked from the yard, stitched with old fence lines and forgotten paths. Shadows behaved differently here. They lingered.
“Slow down,” she called, brushing a vine from her hair. “You’re going to break your ankle.”
Rory reappeared ahead, framed in sunlight and grinning. “Then you’d get to be the hero. Come on, Rosie. You’re not scared, are you?”
“I’m not scared,” she said evenly. “I’m a logician.”
“Is that a thing?”
She shrugged. Her words often lived halfway between invention and intention, and her siblings had long since learned to follow the meaning rather than question the form.
The others worried about Rory. Rosalee worried most. They’d always been close — less than a year apart, raised as much by Jean and Justin as by Phillip and Lynn. When they were eight, he leapt from the shed roof and broke his arm. She cried harder than he did.
That was their rhythm. His recklessness. Her gravity.
❧
The trees thinned into a clearing washed in amber light. The air changed with it — warmer, denser, like something holding its breath.
Rosalee paused at the edge. She hadn’t wanted to leave suburbia, hadn’t wanted any of this — but here, inside the living quiet, she felt something settle in her that she couldn’t name.
“Hey,” Rory whispered, dropping to one knee. “Look at this.”
She crossed to him and froze.
Half an eggshell lay in the brambles, a few shards scattered nearby. Thick. Leathery. Veined like bark. It hadn’t been crushed from the outside or cracked by a fall.
It had been pushed outward.
“This isn’t from a bird,” Rosalee said.
“No,” Rory answered quietly. The teasing had left his voice entirely. “It’s not.”
She reached toward it, stopping just short of contact. The shell radiated warmth — not from the afternoon sun, but from something far more recent. The birds above them had gone silent.
Something had hatched here.
Something large.
She straightened slowly. “We should go back,” she said. “And we shouldn’t tell Mom.”
Rory didn’t argue.
That unsettled her more than anything else in the clearing.
❧
Safe Keeping
The walk back was quiet. Nothing followed. Nothing moved in the brush on either side of the path. The woods simply let them go.
They told no one.
As Rory turned toward home, Rosalee had knelt once more and slipped a jagged shard into her sleeve. She wasn’t sure why. It felt necessary — not a choice so much as a response.
That night, she lay on her bed with the music turned low, turning the shard over in her palm. She couldn’t name what it stirred in her — only that it felt instinctive and protective, like keeping watch over something that didn’t yet know it needed watching.
Whatever had come from this shell was somewhere out there in the dark. Whatever it was, it mattered.
Before sleeping, she wrapped the shard in a handkerchief and hid it deep in her dresser drawer.
In the nights that followed, when the wind shifted from the north, she lay awake and listened. A faint crack of twigs outside her window. A slow, deliberate movement in the underbrush below — not the random noise of the woods settling into itself.
Something learning the shape of the house.
Learning who they were.
❧