Chapter 7: Footsteps Outside the Door (Ella)

I woke at two in the morning.

Not by a sound. By something older—the kind of thing only animals have. The hairs on the back of your neck stand up first, and only then do you realize you’re awake.

The fire in the stove had burned down to red coals. The cabin was dark, only a little gray-white fog-light leaking through the window crack.

I didn’t move. I lay on my side, eyes slowly adjusting.

Jasper was on the floor. I could hear his breathing—deeper than mine, slower, the breathing of a man used to sleeping in the woods. He wasn’t fully asleep either; I noticed his hand kept resting at his side, close to his boot top.

Then I heard it.

Not wind. Outside the door, something stepping on pine needles.

One step. Pause. Another step.

My heart jumped straight into my throat. I didn’t dare move, didn’t dare call Jasper. I just squinted my eyes to a slit, watching that wooden door.

The door was old. A wooden bar bolted it from the inside. But if someone outside wanted in, one stick wouldn’t hold.

The footsteps stopped at the door.

I could picture the person out there, head tilted, listening for whether the people inside were asleep. Just like that night in the library alley—they always listened first.

One second. Two. Five.

Then something, pushed gently under the door crack.

A folded paper.

I waited a full minute. No sound outside. I sat up extremely slowly. My foot touched the floorboards with a soft creak. Jasper’s eyes opened at once.

He didn’t make a sound. He just asked with his eyes.

I nodded at the door crack.

He was at it before me. He bent, picked up the paper, and held it to the faint window light.

I saw his shoulders stiffen.

“What is it?” I whispered.

He handed it to me.

One line only, in a printed typewriter font—the kind any public printer in Black Reef could run off:

“Go back to your card catalog, librarian. Next time we won’t be swapping film.”

I held the paper, my fingers cooling by degrees.

Jasper walked to the window, lifted the curtain a crack. Nothing outside. The fog had swallowed everything.

“How do they know you’re here?” I whispered.

“Two possibilities.” He said. “One, they followed my truck up the mountain. Two—” he paused. “They’ve always known where this cabin is. They just never came.”

“Then why tonight?”

He turned and looked at me. The stove embers lit half his face, shadow on the other half.

“Because until tonight.” He said. “I was still just that silent ranger. Tonight, I spoke.”

He folded the note and put it in his wallet. Then he did something I’d remember over and over later—he opened the stove again, added a log, and built the fire up.

“No sleep tonight.” He said. “I’ll take the first watch. You take the second.”

“Jasper.”

“Yeah.”

“Thank you.”

He didn’t answer. He just sat down in the chair across the stove, the hunting rifle laid across his knees.

I lay back on the bed, listening to the fire pop, listening to his even breathing, listening to the fog outside. I told myself not to be afraid. But my hand was shaking the whole time.

Not because of the note under the door.

Because I suddenly realized—they knew my name now. They knew I was the librarian. In this town, I was finally no longer invisible.

And invisibility, it turned out, had once been a kind of protection.