My notebook was a mess. The list I'd meticulously put together seemed to mock me every time I looked at it. Margins filled with scribbles of words whose meanings I couldn't decipher. I'd added another point, boys at school behaving abnormally, almost frenzied around me, with the incident escalating after I accidentally cut myself and bled. Ethan's reaction had been no less strange, but unlike the others, he seemed simultaneously more and less in control. Struggling, but controlled.

  Weird.

  I flexed my hand out of habit, the scraped skin pulling tight. It still stung a bit, a faint reminder of the chaos it had set off.

  The incident left me rattled, and I was glad it was a Saturday, that I could breathe a bit. Put things into focus.

  I still had to cross Jack off my battle plan list, but I'd been procrastinating, postponing, because quite honestly, I had absolutely no idea how to talk to him.

  Yet life has a particularly annoying habit of making decisions for us, especially when we're reluctant to make them ourselves.

  So, on that particular Saturday morning, I needed some fresh air, so instead of going to the kitchen first thing, I walked out onto the porch.

  And found Jack there.

  He wasn't sitting or relaxing, or doing anything that could be mistaken for leisure. Just standing near the railing with his hands in his pockets, staring out at the yard cast in pale sunlight, as if he were counting the spaces between trees and the exact distance to the woods.

  The early morning air still held the scent of yesterday's rain. The sky was filled with a thin layer of clouds that let enough light through to dye the world in soft golden hues.

  I hesitated in the doorway.

  It was stupid, the way my nerves tried to pretend I was about to approach a stranger, not my own grandfather. But Jack wasn't like Dad. He wasn't like Elise. He felt older than the house itself. A kind of weight, quiet and immovable. The sort of presence you didn't speak over. The sort you didn't want to interrupt.

  Still, he was alone.

  It was the first clean opportunity I'd had in days.

  So I stepped outside, letting the screen door click softly behind me, and kept my pace calm, measured, like I didn't care whether he turned around or not.

  He didn't. He knew I was there anyway.

  The hair at the back of my neck rose, like a warning system I hadn't known I owned before coming to Cold Creek.

  I stopped a few feet away, close enough to speak without raising my voice, far enough not to invade his space.

  For a moment, I just listened. The faint creak of the porch boards settling. The distant clink of something in the barn. The soft, constant hush of the forest pressing in at the edges of the property.

  Jack's profile stayed still, the lines of his face carved by something that looked like it had nothing to do with human years.

  I cleared my throat. "Good morning," then, softer, "Grandfather." The word tasted wrong.

  The story has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the violation.

  He didn't answer. His gaze flicked toward me. His eyes dipped to the scrape on my hand just once, that same unreadable pause as last night, then returned to the yard.

  I swallowed and forced my hands to relax at my sides.

  "Nice weather today." I tried saying something ordinary, simple, to start a conversation. The side eye he gave me told me immediately he wasn't buying it.

  Suddenly my palms felt slick.

  "I'm sorry, I know you don't like talking," I said, and immediately heard how that sounded. Too direct. Too honest. I softened it. "I mean, you don't really… do small talk."

  A tiny shift at the corner of his mouth suggested amusement, or irritation, or both. It vanished before I could be sure.

  "That is an astute observation," he said.

  The wind moved through the trees. Somewhere far off, a crow screeched once, then went quiet.

  "I was wondering," I began, then hated myself for how weak that sounded. I tried again. "May I ask you something?"

  He exhaled through his nose, slow and quiet, like someone who had already heard the question before it was asked.

  "You may," he said, tone cool and flat.

  My fingers curled against the seam of my jeans. I let my gaze drift over the yard, pretending I was casual. Pretending my heart wasn't thudding with the certainty that the porch had teeth.

  I took a breath.

  "I'm trying to understand this place," I said.

  Jack's eyes, green and dark like a deep forest, finally landed on me and stayed there. It seemed to last forever until he blinked.

  "Understand," he echoed, and it sounded like a question.

  "Yes," I said. "Because no one is telling me anything."

  His gaze slid past me toward the kitchen window. I followed it instinctively and saw the faint movement of Elise inside, the light catching her hair as she crossed the room.

  Jack looked back at me.

  "What is there to understand?" he asked.

  I felt my throat tighten. "What isn't?" The words, charged with pent-up frustration and anxiety, escaped me before I could rein them in.

  For a moment, he studied my face in silence, as if reading something beneath my words.

  Then he said, a slight amusement curling one corner of his mouth, "You're tracking."

  I blinked. "I… what?"

  "Tracking. Hunting," he said, the same calm tone he might have used to comment on the weather. "You're on the prowl. Searching for the truth your mind recognizes, yet my son's too stubborn to give."

  I gasped. Heat crawled over my skin.

  He caught me. Of course he did.

  I forced my voice steady. "I don't know what you're talking about."

  Jack's eyes narrowed by a fraction and sparked with sharp, visceral focus.

  Then, to my shock, his gaze softened.

  "Perhaps you're a Blackwell after all," he said, a visible glint in his eyes.

  The words landed strangely. They sounded almost like… pride.

  For a heartbeat, I couldn't breathe, because it was the first time he hadn't looked at me like a foreign organism living under his roof.

  I swallowed. "Is that supposed to make me feel better?"

  Jack's mouth twitched again, almost a smile this time.

  My pulse thudded once, hard.

  I exhaled slowly. So I wasn't crazy. He'd practically admitted it, no matter how weirdly he packaged it.

  "Look… can you just please tell me what's going on," I said, and heard the plea slip into my tone despite my best efforts. "Please."

  Something shifted behind his eyes. Something old and quiet. Like he understood the word please but didn't belong to a world where it actually carried weight.

  He held my gaze for a long moment.

  Then he looked back out into the yard again and said, as if changing the subject, "The moon will be bright tonight."

  I blinked. "What?"

  He didn't look at me when he said it, his gaze fixed on the woods.

  "Bright enough that you see things most people pretend aren't there," he continued, voice even. A small gesture of his chin toward the trees, toward the black edge of the forest. "If you're the kind who looks."

  My blood chilled.

  My mouth went dry. "Is that a warning?"

  Jack's shoulders lifted in the faintest shrug. "You asked for information." He paused. "That is all I can give. The rest is up to you."

  The porch felt smaller all at once.

  "What does that even mean?" I demanded, my voice trembling despite my attempts to hold it down.

  Jack didn't answer. He didn't have to.

  He had already given me what he intended to give me, and something in his expression told me he was done speaking.

  I stood there another moment, leaning against the porch railing, fingers interwoven so my hands wouldn't shake. If Jack noticed, he didn't say anything.

  "Yes," he said eventually. "It really is a nice morning."

  I let out a breath I hadn't even realized I'd been holding.