Page 3 of The Man in the Cottage

It's old-fashioned, the kind with alphabetical tabs and a faded floral cover, filled with handwriting that got shakier toward the end. I flip through it half looking for Travis and half just wanting to see her handwriting, to trace the loops of her letters and pretend she's still here, just in the other room, about to call me in for dinner.

There's nothing under T. Nothing under H either, since I never got his last name.

What I find is a note tucked between the H and I tabs. A small square of paper, folded once, her handwriting steady and clear from before the tremor set in.

I unfold it expecting a grocery list, a phone number, something ordinary.

My stomach drops.

If anything happens to me, let Travis stay. He's a good one. He just needs somewhere to be invisible for a while. Don't ask too many questions. Just trust me.

I read it again. And again.

Invisible.

Don't ask too many questions.

I look up, out the window, at the warm yellow light glowing from the cottage across the dark yard. The smoke still curling from the chimney. The black truck parked in the shadows.

What the hell did my grandmother get herself into?

Chapter Two

Travis

I knew she was coming today.

Mrs. Dawson's granddaughter. The one in all the photos, the one she talked about every time I came by to fix something or check on her or just sit with her on the porch because neither of us had anywhere else to be. Kelly this, Kelly that. Kelly's so smart, Kelly works too hard, Kelly needs to slow down and find herself a good man but don't you dare tell her I said that.

I'd seen the pictures. The little girl with the gap-toothed smile holding up a fish. The teenager in a graduation cap. The woman in a sharp blazer at some work event, smiling a smile you give when someone points a camera at you and you're too tired to argue.

I thought I was ready.

I wasn't ready.

She screamed when she saw me, which I probably deserved. I've been watching the driveway on and off all day, knowing she'd show up eventually, and somehow I still managed to walk out my front door at the exact wrong moment. Classic.

Now I'm sitting on my couch in the dark, coffee gone cold in my hands, thinking about the way she looked at me. Suspicious. Confused. A little scared, though she tried to hide it. She's smaller than I expected from the photos—not short, just... compact. Like she's learned to take up less space than she's entitled to. Natural hair pulled back, dark eyes that don't miss much, a face that probably looks friendly when she's not staring down a stranger in her dead grandmother's backyard.

She let me stay.

I don't know what to do with that.

I should've left months ago. When Mrs. Dawson got sick. When she stopped coming outside. When the hospice nurses started showing up and I had to make myself scarce because I wasn't family, wasn't anyone, just the guy in the cottage who fixed the gutters and pretended he wasn't hiding from the entire world.

I should've left when she died. Packed up my truck and driven somewhere else, anywhere else, started over again the way I've been starting over for the past year. But I couldn't make myself do it. This place felt like the last thread connecting me to something real, and I wasn't ready to cut it.

My grandmother would've called me a coward. She would've been right.

I set the coffee down and lean back, staring at the ceiling. The cottage is quiet. It's always quiet here, which is the whole point, but tonight the silence feels heavier. There's someone in the main house now. Someone moving through the rooms, touching things, learning the shape of her grandmother's absence. I know what that's like. I know how it hollows you out.

I wonder if she's found anything yet. Mrs. Dawson wasn't the type to leave things messy, but she also wasn't the type to explain herself. She let me stay here for six months and never once asked what I was running from. Just looked at me with those sharp eyes—Kelly has her eyes, I realize now, that same way of seeing right through you—and said, "You look like you need a place to be quiet for a while. The cottage is empty."

That was it. No questions, no background check, no lease agreement. Just an old woman who saw something in me I'm not sure I see in myself anymore.

My grandmother sent me here. That's the part I never told Mrs. Dawson, the part that felt too raw to say out loud. They'd been friends for decades, the two of them, met at some church conference in the seventies and kept in touch ever since. Letters at first, then phone calls, then emails when my grandmother finally figured out how to use a computer at age eighty-two. When I told her I needed to disappear for a while, she gave me this address.

"Eleanor will take care of you," she said. "She doesn't ask questions and she doesn't judge. Just be useful and stay out of trouble."