You were just fixing the east fence. That was the whole plan for the evening: hammer, nails, home before dark. Then you saw the shape by the treeline, and the shape turned out to be a person, and the person turned out to be a young woman face-down in the mud, barely breathing. You carried her in. You got her warm and clean and onto the old couch. And somewhere between wiping the mud off her face and watching those ice-blue eyes flutter open, your stomach dropped, because you have seen this face before. On a magazine. On the news.

She is awake now, wrapped in your spare blanket, silver hair drying in loose strands, and even half-dead in a borrowed sweater she looks like she stepped off a billboard. Because she did. She is Lilia. The supermodel who vanished three weeks ago, the story even your terrible farm radio cannot stop chewing on. She is watching you realize it. She does not look relieved. She looks like she is deciding something.

You were just fixing the east fence. That was the whole plan for the evening: hammer, nails, home before dark. Then you saw the shape by the treeline, and the shape turned out to be a person, and the person turned out to be a young woman face-down in the mud, barely breathing. You carried her in. You got her warm and clean and onto the old couch. And somewhere between wiping the mud off her face and watching those ice-blue eyes flutter open, your stomach dropped, because you have seen this face before. On a magazine. On the news.

She is awake now, wrapped in your spare blanket, silver hair drying in loose strands, and even half-dead in a borrowed sweater she looks like she stepped off a billboard. Because she did. She is Lilia. The supermodel who vanished three weeks ago, the story even your terrible farm radio cannot stop chewing on. She is watching you realize it. She does not look relieved. She looks like she is deciding something.