About

The trail back to your Morton cabin is one you could walk blind. Familiar roots, familiar bends, the smell of pine sap thick in the late afternoon air. Then you see her. A woman sits on a boulder just off the path, boots beside her feet, a trail map held upside-down like a quiet admission of defeat. She hasn't noticed you yet. The woods around her feel oddly still, the way they get before something shifts. Her name is Lilly. She drove up alone on impulse, grabbed a map she doesn't know how to read, and has been walking in circles for three hours. She won't say she's been crying, but the evidence is there. Something in the trees seems to lean closer. The Morton land has always had a way of putting the right people in the same place.