It takes three weeks before Lottie speaks to you first.

You’d seen her before that—watched from the edge of the barn or your kitchen window as she drifted across the tall grass with her arms out, grazing the wheat tops like they were real, like she was real. Sometimes she sat beneath the crooked willow by the creek, hands splayed in her lap, chin tilted to the sky as though waiting for it to fall on her. She didn’t talk much. She didn’t look scared either. Just… scattered. Like the wind kept picking her up and putting her down again in the wrong place.

You knew the look.

Her parents had dropped her off like she was another piece of fine furniture in need of dusting. No hugs. No long goodbyes. Just a firm handshake for you, and a signed envelope tucked beneath the fruit bowl. In their words, it was “a place for Charlotte to recover quietly.” In truth, they wanted her out of sight. Out of the headlines. Out of their carefully constructed lives.

They said the country would do her good—fresh air, solitude, simplicity. A reset. She still talked about the wilderness sometimes. Spoke of trees that whispered and antlers in the dark. Sometimes, you caught her watching shadows with too much focus, like she expected them to speak. Like maybe they already had.

After nineteen months in the woods and a psychiatric hospital that smelled like bleach and forgetting, Charlotte Matthews wasn’t the kind of daughter they recognized anymore. She kept seeing things. Hearing things. Muttering about visions and stars and the forest breathing. She wasn’t sick, not exactly, but she wasn’t well either. And most of all, she wasn’t normal. And so, they sent her here—to be fixed. To be made normal. You could tell by the look in her eyes that she knew that, too.

The farm’s rhythm didn’t pause for her. You had honey to jar and tomatoes to prune, tools to mend and stubborn goats to wrangle. But you left the back door unlocked, kept her tea warm, and didn’t ask questions when she wandered into the field behind the beehives and sat there for hours without blinking.

You knew the type of silence she wore. Not the peaceful kind. The kind stitched from things no one else saw.

So when she showed up one evening while you were inspecting the lower hives—dirt on her knees, cardigan slipping off one shoulder, the late sun painting gold into her hair—you didn’t say a word.

She stood close but not too close, eyes flicking toward the bees and then toward you.

“They’re calm,” she said, voice quiet. “Like they know you.”

You straightened slowly, brushing your hands against your trousers. “They do. Mostly.”

She smiled—thin, tired, a little crooked. “I used to think bees were scary.”

“They’re not.” You glanced at her. “They’re honest. Do their job. Protect the hive. No unnecessary cruelty.”

Lottie was quiet for a moment. Then: “That sounds nice.”

You didn’t ask what she meant. She didn’t offer.

That night, she helped you bottle honey. She asked if you ever sold at the local market, if you made candles, what made you stay so far out here alone. You didn’t give her the full truth—just pieces of it, softened by time.

Neither of you said it out loud, but it was clear: you were running from the world in your own ways. You just happened to stop in the same place.

The days passed. She started leaving wildflowers on the kitchen table. You left extra coffee by the windowsill. She asked about the goats, and you let her name one. (“Juniper,” she decided. “Because she’s stubborn and thorny and weirdly beautiful.”) You showed her how to hold a smoker. She told you she used to have visions, once—before everything got too loud.

It was slow, the way things unfolded. But it was real.

Sometimes, you’d catch her watching you with an expression you didn’t quite know what to do with—half wonder, half grief. Like she was still trying to figure out if she deserved this quiet. If she deserved you.

One night, she couldn’t sleep. You found her on the porch, legs curled to her chest. The moon lit her face pale and silver.

“I keep dreaming I’m still out there,” she whispered.