Melissa’s heart thumped loudly in her ears as she grappled for the torch, trying to make it work, to no avail. She reached into her coat pocket for her phone, but it was gone. She slid her hands over the branches around her but couldn’t find it. It must have fallen out as she was running.
She stood up and yelped as pain darted down her leg.
‘Come on, you can do this,’ she told herself, limping through the darkness. But it was useless; she was bleeding too much.
She peered to the right of her, a small yellow light marking Ryan’s lodge out from the surrounding darkness. It was only a five-minute walk away.
She limped in the direction of the lodge, shoving branches and long grass out of her way. When she reached the lodge Ryan had once shared with his father, she rapped gently on the window where she knew his bedroom was. A light was on inside but, still, she didn’t want to risk waking Maddy if she was staying there that night.
‘Ryan,’ she whispered, ‘it’s Melissa.’
The curtain twitched open, Ryan staring out at her. His eyes widened and he opened the window, leaning out.
‘Melissa?’ he asked in surprise. ‘What the hell are you doing here?’
‘Can I come in?’
‘Yeah, of course.’ He appeared at the front door a few moments later, and she noticed he was dressed already in cargo pants and a T-shirt.
‘What’s going on?’ he asked her quietly, looking her up and down as she limped in. ‘Jesus, are you okay?’
She followed his gaze to her shin. There was a hole in her jogging bottoms, blood seeping through it. ‘I fell.’
He gestured to his sofa. ‘Sit down. Let me look at it.’
She took a seat on his brown leather sofa and watched as he reached for a first-aid box in one of the kitchen cupboards. It was an open-plan area with two bedrooms leading off at the back, and a small kitchen overlooking a decent-sized living room with a massive fireplace. She’d been here many times before, first as a child when her father would come over to drink beer with Ryan’s dad . . . and then there was a time when she was here many years later too.
It had changed over the years, once cluttered and neglected by Ryan’s father, with tools and empty beer bottles all over the place, now tidy and smart. Ryan had built a workroom out the back for all his tools, giving the lodge more living space. He had replaced the old carpets too, with neat pine floors, and the walls were now painted a pale blue. The kitchen was small and the most familiar of all, with its original pine units and granite tops, but the units had been repainted as well.
Melissa could still see hints of Daphne’s presence here from all those years ago in some paintings of the forest on the walls and a blue vase on the table, filled with wild flowers. Maddy’s touches were here and there now as well, teen books and notepads strewn over the wooden coffee table in front of Melissa and a small black hoodie with Free the press scrawled on the back.
Ryan sat beside Melissa and lifted her leg on to his knee, rolling her jogging bottoms up to reveal a jagged cut in her skin. She flinched as he pressed a gauze hard against it, stemming the bleeding. Then he took out an antiseptic wipe, cleaning away the blood and dirt before placing a large plaster over the wound. He was quiet as he did it, every now and again examining Melissa’s face with a frown.
‘How’d this happen?’ he asked eventually, ‘and why are you in the forest at this time of the night?’
‘I couldn’t sleep so I took a walk . . . then I fell.’
He raised an eyebrow. ‘I’ll ask again. How did this happen?’
Melissa regarded her old friend’s face, feeling the urgent need to tell him – to tell someone – what had been happening the past three days. But could she trust him, especially with that talk of him having had an argument with Patrick? But then that was just a rumour and there were always plenty of those in Forest Grove, many of them turning out to be untrue. She took in his earnest blue eyes, as familiar to her as the forest. She had always been able to trust him.