Chapter 13: A Walk in the Woods
The crumpled note felt like a live coal in the pocket of his jeans. Leonid had slept maybe an hour, his body rigid beside Mina’s soft, trusting warmth. Dawn arrived as a pale gray smear through the tent fabric, accompanied by the sounds of zippers and muted voices, the cheerful agony of people pretending they liked waking up this early.
“You look like hell,” Mina said, her voice husky with sleep. She was sitting up, already braiding her chestnut hair with efficient fingers.
“Feel like it,” he grunted, pulling a clean shirt over his head. The fabric felt like sandpaper against his skin.
She watched him for a beat too long. “Was it the ground? Or the thoughts?”
He forced a smile, thin and unconvincing. “Both. Let’s get coffee.”
The trailhead was a chaos of backpacks and laughter. The air was cold and clean, scoured with pine. Leonid kept his hands in his pockets, his right thumb worrying the edge of the folded note until the paper was soft as felt. Mina looped her arm through his, leaning into his side as they fell into the middle of the group.
“I heard the lake is insane,” she said, pointing with her chin toward the narrowing path ahead. “Like, actually clear. You can see the bottom.”
“Yeah,” he said. “Sounds good.”
The path climbed immediately, a rough ribbon of dirt and exposed roots that snaked upward into the shadows. Sunlight cut through the high canopy in shattered columns, lighting up motes of drifting pollen and ancient dust. The smell was overwhelming: damp earth, crushed fern, the sweet decay of last year’s leaves.
Mina chatted easily with the people around them, her laughter a bright, melodic sound against the creak of branches and the distant call of a bird. She was performing normalcy for both of them, and he was grateful for it. He offered monosyllabic answers, his mind a broken record: No windows. I can still see you.
“You okay?” she asked, lower now, her breath a cloud in the chill air. “You’re quiet.”
“Just hiking,” he said, squeezing her hand. A lie, smooth and habitual.
The trail got steeper. They had to climb in single file, using gnarled roots as handholds. Leonid went ahead, turning to help Mina over a particularly jagged rock shelf. Her hand was small and warm in his. As she hopped down, she stumbled slightly, and he caught her by the waist, steadying her. Her body was familiar, a known geometry.
“My hero,” she teased, but her eyes searched his face. They held a question she wouldn’t voice out here, surrounded by friends.
He let go first.
For a while, there was just the physical labor of it. The burn in his calves, the scrape of bark under his palms, the rhythm of his own breath. It was almost cleansing. He could almost pretend the note was just a bad dream, that the psychiatric ward was a fiction, that the woman in the locked room was a story he’d heard about someone else. Mina pointed out a cluster of tiny, bell-shaped white flowers growing from a mossy log. She named a bird by its song. She was present in a way he’d forgotten how to be.
He caught himself staring at the back of her neck, at the delicate wisps of hair that had escaped her braid. He felt a surge of something—affection, guilt, a desperate want to be the person she believed he was. He reached forward and tucked one of the strands behind her ear. She glanced back, surprised, then smiled. A real one this time, reaching her eyes. It felt like a victory, and it felt like a theft.
After an hour, the trees began to thin. The light changed, bleaching from green-tinted gloom to a clear, gold-white. The air moved differently—bigger, wetter.
“We’re close!” someone from the front yelled.
The group pushed forward, a collective energy taking over. The final ascent was a scramble up a loose, gravelly slope. Leonid hauled himself up, then turned and planted his feet, pulling Mina up the last few feet with both hands.
They broke the treeline together.
The world opened up.
Below them, cradled in a bowl of sheer rock and dense forest, the lake lay absolutely still. It wasn’t blue, not exactly. It was the color of liquid slate under the overcast sky, its surface a perfect, unblemished mirror reflecting the brooding clouds and the dark fringe of pines. It was profoundly, unnervingly silent. All the chatter of the group died away, swallowed by the vast quiet.
“Wow,” Mina breathed, her hand finding his again. Her fingers were cold. “It’s… it doesn’t even look real.”
It didn’t. It looked like a place outside of time. A place where secrets could be sunk and never found.
The group began picking their way down the final slope to the pebbled shore, voices rising again in excited waves. Mina started to follow, tugging his hand.
Leonid didn’t move.
He was staring at the far shore, where the shadows of the mountains fell longest and deepest onto the water. The surface there was black, opaque. A perfect place for something to watch from, unseen.
I can still see you.
The words weren’t a love note. They were a surveillance report. They meant she was tracking him. In his mind, the sterile room faded, replaced by this primordial landscape. He saw her not in a hospital gown, but standing right there across the water, barefoot on the stones, her hair wild, her eyes fixed on him with that terrifying, absolute knowing. She would understand this place. It matched something inside her.
“Leonid?” Mina’s voice was close, concerned. “You’re pale. Are you feeling sick?”
He blinked. The vision vanished. The far shore was just trees and shadow. A trick of the light. A trick of his mind.
He turned to her, marshaling his features into an approximation of ease. “No. Just… taking it in.” He brought her hand to his lips, a gesture he hadn’t made in months. He kissed her knuckles, feeling the delicate bones beneath her skin. “It’s beautiful.”
She softened, leaning her head against his shoulder as they looked out at the impossible water. For a moment, holding her there, with the cold, clean air filling his lungs, he could almost believe this was enough. That this crisp reality—the weight of her head on his shoulder, the scent of her shampoo mixed with pine, the tangible ache in his muscles from the climb—could overwrite the phantom that lived in his pocket and in his synapses.
He could almost believe he could choose this. The lake, the calm, the good and gentle woman beside him.
Almost.
But as they stood there, the first drop of rain struck the center of the lake, fracturing the perfect mirror into a thousand rippling, concentric circles. The disturbance spread outward, slow and inexorable, until the entire surface was a chaotic dance of broken reflections.