Page 44 of Possessed By the Mountain Man
He looks into the fire. “Used to go there with my sister,” he says quietly, like the words cost him. “When we were kids.”
My chest tightens. This is it. The crack in the armor.
“What was her name?” I ask.
“Wren.”
“That’s beautiful.”
“Yeah,” he mutters. “She hated it. Thought it sounded fragile. Started going by Ren instead.”
A tiny smile ghosts my lips. “Sounds like a badass.”
He nods once. “She was.”
“What happened?”
He goes still. Breathing but not moving. Not blinking.
Then—finally—he answers.
“She got sick,” he says. “And she didn’t get better. I joined the Army. By the time I got leave to come home—” He stops. Jaw flexes once. “Never got to say goodbye.”
My throat stings. No drama in his voice. No theatrics. He says it like a fact of weather. Something he endured and learned not to speak about.
“I’m sorry,” I whisper.
He nods once. “Holidays were her thing. Halloween especially. She’d make us carve pumpkins with kitchen knives and awful stencils. Glue googly eyes on pinecones. She made me dress up.”
I laugh softly. “No.”
He reaches into a wood box on the side table, pulls out a worn Polaroid, and flicks it toward me. I catch it.
Teenage Thorne—longer hair, younger eyes—standing next to a girl with a massive smile… and he’s wearing devil horns.
“Oh my God,” I gasp. “You were adorable.”
“Don’t.”
“Like, painfully adorable. This is a crime.”
“Nobody knows about that picture.”
“I love it.”
He doesn’t smile. But his shoulders shift like some weight loosened.
I hand it back gently. “Thank you… for telling me.”
“I didn’t,” he says gruffly. “You stole it out of me.”
“Yeah,” I say softly. “But you let me.”
Silence. Something heavy moves between us, but not the bad kind. The honest kind. The terrifying kind.
“So now you don’t do holidays,” I say.
“No holidays. No family. No bullshit.”
