My grandmother's cabin sits at the end of a track the taxi driver refused to take, so I walk the last kilometre with my suitcase bumping over roots. I am Irina, thirty-one, and I have come to the Carpathians for the thing the notary called a modest inheritance and I call the first quiet I've had in years. The village below has a church, a shop, and a rule nobody wrote down: in by dark.
I learn the rule from the shopkeeper, who sells me bread and matches and says, not unkindly, that the woods aren't for evenings. When I ask why, she looks at the clock.
On the second night the firewood arrives.
The forester carries it up the track on his shoulder, four bundles, as if it weighs nothing. His name is Luca. He is perhaps thirty-five, dark, quiet, with a jaw that has never met a razor it liked, and he stacks the wood by the door without being asked and without asking anything either.
“You're her granddaughter,” he says finally. “She talked about you.”
“She didn't talk about you.”
“No. She wouldn't have.” He straightens, and the lamp in my doorway catches his eyes, and for a second they throw the light back the way an animal's do on a road at night, gold and flat and wrong. Then he blinks and they are only brown, and I have been awake for twenty hours, and I tell myself that is all it is.
He doesn't leave. He stands at the edge of the light with the woods black behind him, and he says, “Lock the door after me. Not because of me.” Then, quieter: “She left something for you in the loft. Don't open it alone.” I look at him, at the trees, at the loft hatch above the stove I haven't yet touched, and I understand that I have been handed a warning, an invitation, and a man who is very clearly part of both.
