Work Text:
It started with the wrong trail.
Isabel had meant to take the ridge loop, but the markings were old, and the guide was buried in her backpack — beside the prenatal vitamins, her husband’s lens cap, and a note she hadn’t had the nerve to read. The sign at the fork was split by sun and wind. She chose left.
Which is how she met him.
He didn’t look like someone you’d find alone in the wilderness. Long legs, battered cap, boots that had seen deserts or stages or both. He didn’t say much, not at first. Just a nod. A glance toward the trees.
They walked a while in silence.
Later, she’d remember the way he watched the wind move through the canopy — like it was music only he could hear. Like it mattered. When he finally spoke, it was with a voice made for echo: rough, resonant, low.
“You’re not from here.”
Neither was he.
She didn’t say she was pregnant. He didn’t say who he was. For a few hours, it didn’t matter who they’d been — only that they were still breathing.
Still capable of choosing the next step.
They stopped near a fallen log, not to rest, but to notice the quiet. The way the air shifted. The way light gathered in the curve of his jaw as he turned.
He said something odd then. Not a question — more like an offering.
“Sometimes I think I was supposed to be a ghost. But I didn’t quite make it.”
She didn’t answer. Just nodded. She knew the feeling.
The sun fell. The light changed. And somehow, that stretch of forest became a hinge — a quiet, impossible moment neither of them could explain.
They didn’t exchange numbers. Didn’t promise anything. Just walked back until the fork returned.
She left him with a look he would later call true.
He left her with a lyric scrawled on a trail map corner — words she wouldn’t read until she was back in her room, unpeeling her socks and pressing her hand low, under the growing swell of her belly.
It said:
- If I ever write it down right, it’ll be about this. You. The quiet. The light.
Below that, in uneven print:
Elliott.