Page 20 of Her Wicker Guardian

He turns toward Shannon’s voice, but instead of moving away again, he takes half a step closer to me. Six inches, maybe. I go very still.

He had space in every other direction. He used some of it to come nearer to me.

Blair’s gaze flicks from him to me. “Rachel.”

“I saw it.”

Her eyebrows lift. “Good.”

She doesn’t say anything else, which somehow makes the six inches harder to dismiss.

Shannon reaches for her pocket, and he flinches. “Wait.” Her hand stops immediately. “Phone,” she says, moving more slowly as she takes it out. “We need to call somebody.”

My own phone vibrates once against my thigh. I leave it there. “Who would we call?”

“Police. An ambulance. Somebody who knows what to do.”

Blair looks toward the wicker man rather than at Shannon. “Which professionals? The wicker-person department?”

Shannon frowns. “I’m serious.”

“So am I. What are you going to tell dispatch? The six-foot wicker bear in Rachel’s yard turned into a man?”

Janet says quietly, “A wicker man.”

Blair looks at her. “I don’t think that distinction will improve the dispatch notes.”

That’s the problem. I picture squad cars on the gravel, radios cracking, doors opening, strangers coming around the cottage fast because that is what people do when they think there might be danger. He’s already backed away from five women he doesn’t understand. I can’t imagine what he would make of uniforms, flashing lights, and ten people giving him orders in a language he may barely know.

“Calling creates a record,” Blair says. “Maybe we’ll need one eventually. The first people who arrive will have to decide whether he’s a patient, a threat, or evidence before they know anything about him. I don’t know what happens after that.”

Evidence.

Something in me hardens. At some point while Blair’s been talking, I’ve moved half a step, enough that I’m standing a little more between him and the others. “He’s a person.”

Nobody argues. He watches us, learns from us, retreats when we frighten him, and copies what I show him. None of that proves he’s safe, but it’s more than enough to make the thought of handing him over to strangers feel wrong. “I think we wait,” I say. “At least until morning. We learn what we can, see what he understands, and don’t do anything tonight that we can’t undo.”

Laura nods slowly. Shannon still looks unhappy, but she puts her phone away.

Then her gaze shifts toward the cottage. “Where does he sleep?”

The answer leaves me before I can soften it. “Not in the house.”

The instant I picture the front door closing behind an adult male body, the calculations arrive. Where he is in the room. How many steps to the kitchen door. Where the gun is. How fast I could reach it. My jaw aches from how hard I clamp it while my mind does work I never asked it to perform.

I make myself look at him instead of the house. He’s ten feet away with empty hands. Every time one of us frightened him, he made more space. When he moved closer to me, it was six inches, and then he stopped.

Laura looks toward the back of the cottage. “What about the porch?”

I follow her gaze. The porch runs along the back of the cottage, roofed and screened on three sides. An old outdoor chaise sits against the house wall with two mismatched chairs and a small table beside it. Beyond the rear screen, the yard gives way to woods. It has zero visibility to neighbors.

“It’s outside,” I say.

“But covered,” Laura says.

Blair looks toward the woods. “And nobody would be shutting him inside anything.”

Janet studies me rather than the porch. “Would you feel safe with him there?”