Welcome to Hollowmere (Population: Dead Inside)

Twenty-sixth of August. Dunning, H., age 52. Left arm, shoulder, throat (partial). Found at the logging road, mile four. Wolf, so-called. Survived. No further action.

Okay. Picture a Honda Odyssey with a hundred and sixty thousand miles on it, six kids, one mother pretending to love "fresh air," and a father driving like the GPS had personally wronged him.

That was us. The Harrows. Formerly of West 87th Street, currently of nowhere.

"Has anyone seen a Starbucks," I said, "or a CVS, or a human being under the age of ninety, or literally one stoplight?"

"There was a moose," Owen said, without looking up from his Switch.

"A moose is not infrastructure, Owen."

Max and Mia had been whisper-fighting in the way-back for three hours, which is what sixteen-year-old twins do instead of breathing. Lucy had read an entire paperback since Bangor and started another. Bea, six and sticky, had her face mashed against the window, narrating trees. "Tree. Big tree. Tree. Dark tree."

"They're all dark trees, Bea-bug," Mom said. "That's the forest."

Dad's hands tightened on the wheel. Just slightly. I clocked it because I clock everything; it's a Manhattan survival skill, like walking fast or ignoring a man yelling about the Book of Revelation on the 1 train.

The sign came up out of the fog, hand-painted, peeling. HOLLOWMERE. EST. no date, because apparently the date had peeled off too.

"Wow," I said. "Population: dead inside."

"Katie."

"I'm being supportive. It's quaint. It's giving murder podcast."

I was wearing my I ♥ NY hoodie. The tourist one, the ugly one from a cart on Canal Street, two sizes too big, washed so many times the heart had gone the pink of a sad salmon. I had put it on in our empty apartment that morning and I had informed my family I would be taking it off when we moved back, which would be soon, because this was clearly a phase Dad was going through, like the year he got into sourdough.

"So when do we go home," I said. "Ballpark. Thanksgiving? I can do Thanksgiving."

"This is home."

"Dad."

"We're not going back."

He didn't say it loud. That was the problem. Daniel Harrow yells about the Knicks, about parking tickets, about people who clap when the plane lands. He did not yell this. He said it the way you'd say the stove was off, and then he turned up the radio, which was playing static, because there was no station.

The house was big and old and smelled like someone else's grandmother. My room had a slanted ceiling and a window that faced the trees, which were not so much a view as a wall. The Greywood, the realtor's papers called it, like it was a nice subdivision.

I lay awake. You don't understand silence until you've lived above a bodega. No sirens. No garbage trucks. No drunk guy singing Whitney at two a.m. Just cold leaking through the old glass and the smell of pine, so thick it felt like breathing a candle.

Then something howled.

It started low, way out, and climbed, and climbed, and kept climbing past the point where any dog I'd ever met would've run out of lung. A second voice joined it. Then a third, closer, from a different direction entirely, and that one didn't howl so much as scream, a ragged, almost human sound that made the hair on my arms stand up under the hoodie. I sat up. My breath fogged. Something moved down there at the treeline, heavy enough that I heard branches give, heard the long dragging crush of it going away, and I sat with my knees pulled up and my phone in my hand with one bar, thinking, very clearly, I would trade every tree in Maine for one rat on the Q platform right now.

Across the hall, Dad's door opened. I heard him go downstairs. I heard the back door lock click, and then the deadbolt, and then the chain.

He didn't come back up for a long time.

The diner was called Edie's, and it was the only place in town that served coffee, so by eight a.m. I was there with Bea on one hip and Owen trailing behind me like a ghost with a battery pack. Mom was unpacking. Dad had left before sunrise. The twins were "sleeping," meaning God knows.

Red vinyl booths. A pie case. A bell over the door that announced me to every single person inside, all of whom looked up, looked at the hoodie, and looked back down.

Cool. Love that.

I ordered at the counter. Two men in Carhartt jackets were talking three stools down.

"Hank Dunning," one said. "Out by mile four."

"Arm?"

"Arm and the neck. They think he'll keep the arm."

"Huh." The second man stirred his coffee. "Early this year."

"Yep. Supposed to rain Thursday."

"Yep."

I waited for the rest of that conversation. There wasn't any. The waitress topped them off. Somebody laughed in a booth about a fishing thing. Bea pointed at the pie and announced, "Pie," and nobody died, except Hank Dunning nearly had.

"Sorry," I said. "Sorry, hi. Did you say a guy got mauled?"

The man with the coffee looked at me the way you look at a pigeon that's gotten onto the train.

"Animal," he said.

"Right, okay, what animal? Because I heard it last night, I think, and it sounded like a lot of animal. Like several. Is anybody calling, like, Fish and Game? Animal Control? The Avengers?" I laughed. Nobody else did. "Why is nobody freaking out? A man almost lost his arm and you guys are doing the weather."

And the room went quiet.

I mean all of it. The fishing story stopped mid-word. The waitress set the pot down on the burner and left her hand on the handle. A fork lay on a plate and stayed there. Even the bell over the door, which had been swinging a little from Owen, went still, and in all that quiet I could hear the grill ticking and Bea breathing wetly against my neck.

Nobody looked at me. That was worse. Every person in Edie's was looking at their coffee, their eggs, the window, the pie, with the careful, practiced blankness of people who had done this before. Many times. Like a fire drill.

Then someone at the end of the counter set down his mug.

He was maybe nineteen. Dark hair that needed cutting, flannel with the sleeves shoved up, forearms like he chopped things recreationally. He turned on the stool, and his eyes were gray. Storm gray, rain-on-the-Hudson gray, the kind of gray that looks right through your hoodie and finds you lacking.

"Stop asking," he said.

"Excuse me?"

"You heard me."

"I did, I'm just giving you a chance to hear yourself."

His mouth did something. It wasn't a smile. It was a decision not to smile. He got up, dropped a five by his mug, and walked toward the door, which was behind me, which meant he had to pass close, close enough that I smelled cold air and woodsmoke on him, close enough that I had to tip my head back, which I resented.

"Stay out of the woods," he said.

"I live next to the woods. They're kind of the whole décor."

"Then stay next to them." He glanced down at my sneakers. Running shoes. Hokas, neon, very Central Park reservoir loop. Something in his face went flat. "You don't run in these woods, city girl."

Let me be very clear: my heart was not doing anything. My heart was fine.

"Sweetie," I said, "I've run through Times Square on New Year's Eve with a drunk Elmo chasing me. Your trees don't scare me."

He looked at me for one long second, like he was memorizing exactly where I'd be standing when I was wrong.

"They should," he said, and the bell rang, and he was gone.

The room started back up like someone had unpaused it. The fork moved. The fishing story resumed. The waitress poured my coffee and said, "That's the Holt boy. Ronan," as though that explained anything, and then, softer, not meeting my eyes, "He's not wrong, hon."

Dad was home when we got back, at the kitchen sink, washing his hands for way too long. I put the coffee down hard.

"A man got attacked last night. By the logging road."

"I heard."

"The whole diner acted like it was a parking ticket."

"People here are private."

"People here are weird. What's out there? You grew up in Maine, you'd know—"

"Kate." He turned off the water. "Leave it."

He dried his hands, and as he folded the towel I saw his left palm, the old white scar that cuts straight across it, thick as a shoelace. I've seen that scar my whole life. Kitchen accident, he always said. Broken glass. He closed his fist over it like he'd noticed me noticing.

"Promise me you'll stay out of—" He stopped. His jaw worked. He looked out the window at the trees, and he did not finish the sentence. "Out of there."

"The woods, Dad. You can say woods."

He went upstairs.

I stood in the kitchen for a minute. Then I got out my phone, opened Maps, and zoomed in on the gray-green nothing past our backyard until a thin line appeared, unlabeled, running north.

The logging road. Mile four was about two and a half miles from my window.

I laced my Hokas double-knotted, pulled the hood up, and texted Mia: if mom asks I'm on a run. normal one. on pavement.

Three dots. Then: liar.