DAWN MISTS HUNG OVER THE COLLEGE THE NEXT MORNING AS Cassie zipped her hooded sweatshirt and turned off the pathway away from her new dorm. After the tea, she’d been too tired to do anything but drag her bags up to her room and crash, sleeping through the rest of the afternoon and night. She’d woken early, her limbs screaming with new energy only an early run would satisfy.
It looked like she was the only one. As she walked briskly along the neat pathways, the Raleigh campus was still and silent in the dawn light. Cassie stretched, then skirted the back wall until she found a path down to the river. She broke into a jog, her sneakers pounding the dirt as she headed deeper into the lush green of the college grounds.
As she settled into her usual stride, Cassie felt her tension ease for the first time since boarding the plane back in Boston. She loved this time of day. It gave her a moment to think, a space that was all her own. A certain hush fell over a city in the early morning, and she could see now that Oxford was no different; it was a swath of calm broken only by gentle birdsong and the low rumble of traffic out beyond the college walls. October had just begun. The mists hung low over dewdrop lawns, and her only company was a flock of swans gliding gracefully along the dark waters of the river.
Cassie turned out from the back gates and ran along the scenic walk that wound out from Raleigh’s manicured lawns, her strides lengthening as she followed the path of the river out past the gardens and into the wilderness of the woodland beyond. With every footstep she felt the years fall away, stripping back the winding journey that had brought her here, halfway across the world—years when home had meant the contents of her duffel bag, and success simply enough cash to pay the rent that month. When Oxford was just a distant city, as arbitrary a destination as a pin pushed randomly into a creased old map.
Until the day the package came.
Cassie had found it propped outside her door one icy morning three years ago. The foreign stamps were peeling, and the original Oxford postmark was smudged and faded, the labels pasted in turn, redirecting the box through old apartments and past crimes all the way back to the original recipient.
Her mother.
Cassie had turned the battered manila envelope over in her hands, wondering how the package had found its way to her at all. She was in Providence, Rhode Island, that month, renting a room above a Polish restaurant, the air smoky with the scent of paprika. She paid cash to a wizened old woman in baggy knit cardigans, who would pluck the skin on her bony wrists in disapproval and leave Tupperware containers of dumplings and broth outside the door. But aside from this well-intentioned babula, Cassie remained invisible. She didn’t appear on any electoral rolls, had no credit or store cards, and kept any cash locked in a heavy tin fishing box slipped into the ventilation shaft above her bed. Deleting herself from the record of everyday life had been a conscious, careful decision. As far as Cassie was concerned, in the eyes of the world, she didn’t exist.
She’d been wrong.
You can’t hide the truth forever. Please come back and end this for good.
The note was simple, written in small, blocked letters and tucked inside the package along with a collection of mysterious items.
Cassie had sat down with a thump on the top step of the staircase and reached for her pendant, the only thing of her mother’s she had been able to keep. Joanna had been gone for nearly ten years now, and the rose quartz cameo was chipped with age, the strange, twisted design of the gold setting faded and peeling. Still, Cassie couldn’t bring herself to throw it away. It was the only anchor she had to her past, and a warning of everything she could become, if she wasn’t careful.
Her fingertips traced the familiar cracked pendant as she wondered what the note could mean. Her mother had stayed friendless, drifting; Cassie had never even seen her write a letter, let alone speak of anyone she stayed in contact with. And surely, any friend she’d had would know by now of her passing.
Ten years was a long time.
What did the note mean? And, after everything, should Cassie even care? It had taken her years to sand her life down to its current frictionless state. Did she really want to dig up painful memories and disturb the ghosts that had barely been laid to rest?
The answer seemed obvious.
No.
Cassie had crumpled the letter back into the package and pushed it deep into the back of her closet, ignoring the questions dancing in her mind for the rest of the week. She sidestepped the creeping whispers of curiosity, filled her every waking moment with screens and pages and a constant stream of noise from her headphones, but still, the question wouldn’t go away. Soon, she was waking at three A.M. in a cold sweat, shaking from dark, desperate dreams that saw her trapped in her childhood house, searching, racing through the shadows trying to find something that always stayed just out of reach. She took to running, pounding the empty downtown streets in the early morning darkness, but her mother’s poetry began whispering in the fog-breathed air, stanzas and whole sonnets Cassie hadn’t even known she’d learned by heart. She tried to medicate the curiosity away with pills and weed and glinty-eyed strangers in dive bars, but nothing helped.
After ten straight sleepless nights, the gray winter weather finally broke. Trees unfurled with cherry blossoms on the hills above town, and Cassie retrieved the package from its dark hiding place and began her quest for answers.
A noise broke Cassie from her memories. Another runner was approaching from the opposite direction on the path in the Raleigh woodlands. He was in his late twenties, with fair hair peeking out from under a knit cap, and dressed in dark sweats with earbuds snaking up from under his shirt.
Cassie moved to the far side of the dirt track to let him pass, but instead the man slowed and pulled out one of his earphones. “Careful up ahead,” he told her, with a friendly smile. “There’s still ice on the path.”
She nodded her thanks, but then waited until he’d disappeared behind the next bend before slowing to a stop. She caught her breath, feeling her heart beat fast. In the distance, church bells began to ring out across the meadows: five, six, seven. Cassie looked ahead to the inviting curve of the path; she would happily run for another hour, out, away from the confines of the libraries and first tutorials that awaited her, but she had work to do.
The mysterious package had sent her here for a reason, and there was no time to waste.