Chapter 1 - CHAPTER 1
“Are you crazy? You brought a bloodied stranger into your house, and you live alone!”
That was the first thing Mrs. Mabel shouted when she found out. But by then, the man had already been lying on the old sofa in my entryway for nearly twenty-four hours, with one swollen leg, cuts covering his hands, and a look of exhaustion so deep that he didn’t even seem to have the energy to lie.
My name is Clara Whitmore. I’m thirty-four years old and live in the quiet foothill country near Pine Ridge. Ever since my husband Thomas died in an accident three years ago, I have lived alone, sewing clothes for customers and keeping the books for two stores in town.
That night, I had already gone to bed when an uneasy feeling made me get up. The light by the gate was flickering, and beside the entrance, I saw what looked like a dark sack.
Then it moved.
It was a man leaning against the gate, his clothes torn, a wound on his cheek, and cuts covering his hands. He was breathing.
The municipal ambulance service told me it would take more than an hour and a half to arrive because it had rained and the road was in terrible condition.
I called Hank, my neighbor. Together, we carried the man inside.
He had no identification, only a destroyed phone. I cleaned his wounds, bandaged his hands, and spent hours watching over his swollen leg.
When he opened his eyes at dawn, he stared at me for a long moment.
“Can you talk?”
He shook his head.
“What’s your name?”
Nothing.
I left a notebook and a pencil beside him.
He didn’t write anything until that night.
Two words.
“Thank you. Gabriel.”
That was how it all began.
Over the next few days, he walked very little, ate a lot, and said almost nothing. He denied having any family and also denied that anyone was looking for him.
On the third day, Sheriff Bradley arrived after a neighbor apparently alerted him.
“There’s no Gabriel matching that description among the missing persons reported in the state. Be careful, Clara.”
I should have been frightened, but his eyes didn’t look like those of a man running from the law. They looked like someone running from something much harder to explain.
On the fourth day, he managed to sit with me in the kitchen. I asked him where he had come from.
He pointed toward the mountains.
“The mountains?”
He nodded.
He wrote that he had been missing for almost two months. He had gone fishing with some friends when a flash flood overturned their boat and the current swept him away. From then on, he had survived by walking through ravines, following streams, and eating whatever he could find.
Then he picked up the pencil and wrote:
“Aren’t you afraid of me?”
I wrote underneath:
“No.”
“Why?”
I thought for a moment.
“Because dangerous people usually don’t ask for permission with their eyes.”
He read it and, for the first time, gave me the faintest smile.
On the fifth day, he tried to help me move sacks of feed for the chickens. I ordered him to go back inside.
He ignored me.
Limping, he carried one.
Then another.
When he finished, he sat beside the chicken coop, exhausted but satisfied.
That night, Hank came over for coffee.
“The sheriff found out more. No one with that name has been reported missing. Not here or in any neighboring state.”
After he left, I went into the entryway.
Gabriel was awake.
“Is that your real name?”
He nodded.
“Are they looking for you?”
He took longer this time, but nodded again.
A strange chill ran through my stomach.
“Then you lied to me.”
He picked up the notebook.
He wrote a single sentence:
“I don’t want to leave this place.”
May you like
I stared at him, not knowing what to say.
And I still couldn’t imagine that, two days later, a private helicopter would land behind my house looking for the man everyone in town thought was a homeless drifter.
