Simon Riley did not move to Scotland because he wanted to heal.

Healing sounded too clean. Too organized.

He moved because Soap was gone, because the military had finally run out of reasons to keep him standing in rooms full of maps and orders and men who tried not to look at the empty space where Sergeant MacTavish should have been running his mouth.

So Simon bought a cottage where the hills folded over themselves in wet green layers, where the sky stayed low enough to feel personal, where the nearest village had one shop, one pub, and an alarming number of old women who spoke in warnings.

“Don’t live too close to the woods.”

He did.

“Don’t answer voices after sundown.”

He didn’t answer most voices before sundown, either.

“Leave iron by the door.”

He used it to weigh down recipe cards.

“Fae are real here, Mr. Riley.”

That one almost made him laugh.

Back in England, fairies belonged in children’s books and garden ornaments. Simon listened the way soldiers listened to civilians explaining local superstition.

With the emotional investment of a man being told a sheep might file taxes.

Then he went home, hung his coat by the fire, and learned how to make bread. That was the problem with grief. It left hours behind. Great empty things with teeth. The first loaf came out dense enough to damage flooring. The second was worse.

By the fourth, he had stopped measuring by instinct and started reading the actual recipe like a functioning adult. Six months later, the kitchen smelled like yeast, rosemary, apple peels, and butter more often than it smelled like gun oil. His hands, once trained for weapons, learned dough. His shoulders softened under flannel. His stomach rounded slightly from too many test batches and too little running, the kind of weight earned by warm kitchens, late-night scones, and pretending a second slice was quality control.

The woods became part of his routine.

Foraging gave his hands something to do that wasn’t cleaning, checking, fixing, remembering. Wild garlic in spring. Mushrooms if he was careful. Berries staining his fingers in summer. Herbs tucked between roots and stones. The forest had rules he could respect: know what you’re touching, watch where you step, pay attention or pay for it.

Simple. Until the day the trees went quiet.

Not silent. Quiet. There was a difference.

Simon stilled with a basket hooked over one arm, knife in hand, thumb resting against the worn handle.

Then he saw them. Not fully.

A shape where there should have been bracken. The pale edge of a face half-hidden by leaves. Ears too fine to belong to any human he knew. Clothing that looked less sewn than grown, touched by moss, thread, and moonlit stubbornness.

An elf.

The thought arrived flat and useless. Simon stared. His first response was not wonder. It was irritation.

Because every old woman in the village was about to be smug.

The basket shifted in his grip. One mushroom rolled free, bounced off his boot, and landed in the moss between them with all the dignity of a tiny brown idiot.

Simon looked down at it. Then back at the figure in the trees.

“Well,” he said, voice rough from disuse and woodland air, “that’s my lunch making a break for it.”

No answer came. The clearing held itself tight.

Simon’s gaze moved with soldierly caution, not fear. The pointed ears. The strange stillness. The too-careful distance.

His fingers flexed once on the basket handle. He should leave.

That was the practical answer. Walk back to the cottage. Shut the door. Put iron on the threshold like the villagers said. Admit, privately and under no legal obligation, that Scotland had decided to be weird at him and this is somehow Soap's ghost's fault.

Instead, Simon crouched slowly and picked up the mushroom.

“Right,” he said after a long moment. “I’m Ghost.”

A pause. He tipped his head toward the fallen mushroom.

“Don’t know what elves eat,” he added. “But if it’s people, I’m going to be very disappointed.”