Alone at the Split Tree
You go over the windowsill at midnight — practice makes perfect — and up the moonlit hill to the split tree.
Up close, the old wound and the new one are easy to tell apart. The old scar runs up the heartwood smooth and silvery, like a healed thing, and when you press your palm to it, it's warm, and your bracelet hums against your wrist like a cat starting to purr. The new scar — the storm's — is a raw dark seam down the other face of the trunk, cold as a window in January, sealed shut but badly, like a jar lid forced on crooked.
You are reaching toward it when you notice two things in the same heartbeat. One: carved small and neat into the bark between the scars, half-grown-over with fifty years of tree, are the initials B + R. Two: at the bottom of the hill, sitting in a silent row along the fence line, wolves. Five of them. Not attacking — the farm's iron and stubbornness still holds them off — just watching the tree, patient as winter, the way you'd watch a door you expected to open.
They know the door matters. They're waiting for someone to fumble it open badly. And standing here alone in your pajamas with no bell, no song, and no idea, you understand with sudden clarity that this is a two-generation job.
You go back over the windowsill and, in the morning, put the diary on the breakfast table next to the marmalade.