By the time Adam reached the fire, his teeth were knocking together hard enough to hurt.
"Sit on the stone," the woman said. "The little one. The big one's loose."
He sat on the big one. It tipped, and he caught himself with both hands in the dirt.
She waited while he moved.
Up close she had a burn on the inside of her wrist, a pale crescent just below the place where her sleeve was rolled. He saw it when she handed him a cup. Steam rose from something that smelled of mint and wet bark.
"Drink slowly."
He drank too fast and burned his tongue.
"You can hear me, can't you?" she asked.
That startled a laugh out of him. It turned into a cough, and she took the cup away until it passed.
"I'm Adam," he managed.
"Sera."
"Is this Alder's Cross?"
For the first time since he'd stepped into the clearing, she stopped moving. Behind her, the pot lid rattled.
"Where did you hear that name?"
"On a map. I parked up the hill." He pulled the keys from his pocket. They were slick with water, but the little red panic button looked absurdly ordinary. He pressed it. He waited for the horn.
Sera looked toward the trees with him. For a few seconds they listened together.
"Alder's Cross is a ford," she said. "Or it was. My grandmother used to take sheep over it. The water changed course before I was born."
Adam closed his fist around the keys. He had been counting on the car without realizing it. There was a bottle of water in the passenger door, a dry sweatshirt in the boot, a receipt from a petrol station on the seat. He could picture the grease stain on the receipt more clearly than he could picture the way back.
"Then take me where it used to be."
Sera lifted the pot off the fire. "When you can stand without using both hands."
He looked down. His palms were flat against the stone.
✦ ✦ ✦
She gave him a wool blanket and pointed him behind the cottage to change out of his jacket. He hung it on a fence rail. In the garden, someone had drawn lines between rows of seedlings with a stick. At the end of one line was a crooked thumbprint in the soil. He kept looking at it while he tried to get his fingers to work.
When he came back, Sera was cutting bread. She gave him the heel, then saw how he was holding it and tore the crust into pieces for him. She did it briskly, as if he were a person with cold hands and there was no more to be said about it. He was grateful enough that he couldn't look at her for a moment.
"What's the date?" he asked.
"Last day of March."
His shoulders dropped. A whole explanation began assembling itself. He'd hit his head. He'd walked farther than he remembered. The woman belonged to some village that put on demonstrations for tourists. He could apologize for staring at her clothes.
"And the year?"
"Seventeen twenty-six."
He waited for her to smile. She put another piece of bread by his cup.
"I left home this morning," he said. "It was twenty twenty-six."
She rubbed the crumbs from the knife with her thumb. "What were you going to do when you got home?"
Of all the things she could have asked him, that was the one he hadn't prepared to answer. He'd meant to put his clothes in the wash. There was a message from his sister he could have answered in the time it took the kettle to boil. He'd seen the first line that morning. Are you around on Sunday? He'd swiped it away because he didn't know yet how he wanted to spend Sunday.
"Call my sister," he said.
Sera set the knife down. For a while there was only the sound of Adam chewing.
Then she said, "I can show you the ford before the light goes."
✦ ✦ ✦
The way down took them through hazel scrub. Twice Adam slipped. The second time Sera offered her hand and he took it. Her fingers were warm from the fire, and when the ground leveled she kept hold of him for one more step, until she was sure he had his balance.
The ford was a hollow filled with last year's leaves. Two upright stones faced each other across it. The one on Adam's side had a horizontal crack at knee height. He knew that crack. He had crouched beside it to put his fingers in the stream.
He crossed the hollow, walking carefully at first and then too quickly. On the opposite bank the slope rose into trees. The path where he'd left his car ought to have been ten paces up. He went ten paces. Then twenty.
"Adam."
Sera was still at the bottom. She had crouched beside the cracked stone without touching it.
"Come back the way you went," she said. "Don't step between the stones."
He followed his own footprints until he could see what she was looking at. A bead of water had formed on a dead leaf. As he watched, it ran up the leaf's stem and disappeared into the crack.
The phone in his trouser pocket vibrated.
He pulled it out so fast he nearly dropped it. The screen was black. He pressed the side button. For a second he saw only the dim sky reflected in the glass. Then the screen lit.
MARA CALLING
He made a sound that might have been her name. His thumb was already moving toward the green circle when Sera caught his wrist.
"Wait."
"That's my sister."
"Look at the water."
He could hear it now, under the leaves. There was a small, busy sound like someone pouring from a jug. Water was climbing the sides of the hollow. It reached a root, hung there in a clear sheet, then began to run along the root toward his feet.
The phone vibrated again. Sera's grip tightened with it. Adam looked at her hand and saw that she was shaking.
"My grandmother heard her brother at this ford," she said. "He'd been missing since winter. When she went down to him, her mother had to pull her out by her hair."
"Did she see him?"
"No. But she said he sounded cold."
The green circle pulsed under his thumb. He thought of Mara at her kitchen table, where she always sat to make a call even if the kettle was on and dinner was burning. He thought of her hearing it ring. He stepped back anyway. Sera came with him, feeling for the ground with her heel.
The call vanished. The water dropped through the leaves with a soft patter. Somewhere up the slope a bird resumed a call Adam hadn't noticed it stop making.
He could have put the phone away then. He meant to. But a notification had taken the place of the call, a single message from Mara. Its timestamp read 31 March 2026, 8:14 p.m.
Adam had left the car shortly after two.
He read the message once, then held the screen so Sera could see, forgetting for a moment that she didn't know Mara or what the time meant.
I found your car. Who's knocking from inside?