The Reunion at Blackwood Lodge

• Chapter 1 The Invitation
• Chapter 2 Up the Mountain
• Chapter 3 Blackwood Lodge
• Chapter 4 Familiar Strangers
• Chapter 5 The First Toast
• Chapter 6 Missing Pieces
• Chapter 7 Echoes of Senior Year
• Chapter 8 The Locked Boathouse
• Chapter 9 Whispers in the Pines
• Chapter 10 A Photograph Burned
• Chapter 11 The Power Goes Out
• Chapter 12 Blood on the Snow
• Chapter 13 Accusations
• Chapter 14 The Night of the Bonfire
• Chapter 15 Someone Is Watching
• Chapter 16 The Basement Door
• Chapter 17 Lies We Told Ourselves
• Chapter 18 A Sudden Departure
• Chapter 19 The Truth in the Ashes
• Chapter 20 Remembering the Fall
• Chapter 21 Five Became Four
• Chapter 22 Confrontation
• Chapter 23 The Confession
• Chapter 24 Sirens in the Distance
• Chapter 25 Leaving Blackwood
• Chapter 26 What Remains

The envelope arrived on a Tuesday, wedged between a water bill I had been ignoring since September and a glossy flyer for a mattress sale. I almost threw it away. Most things that come in heavy, cream-colored cardstock with my name written in actual fountain pen ink are either wedding invitations from people I barely liked in high school or polite requests for money from my alma mater. I had no interest in attending the former and no intention of funding the latter.

Still, I set the water bill on the kitchen counter and turned the envelope over. There was no return address. Just a smudged postmark from Portland and a single, neat strip of wax sealing the flap—not red, which would have been melodramatic, but a dark, matte forest green.

I stood there in my socks, holding a butter knife I’d been using to scrape burnt toast, and stared at it. Outside my third-floor apartment window, Seattle was doing its usual November impression of a wet wool blanket. The radiator clanked once, twice, and then settled into a low, asthmatic hiss.

I slid the butter knife under the wax. It popped off cleanly, landing somewhere near the baseboards.

Inside was a single card, thick enough to double as a coaster. No borders, no embossed pinecones, no cheerful clip art. Just four lines of black, serif font centered in the middle of the page.

Ten years. Blackwood Lodge. November 14–17. Be there.

At the bottom, in the same fountain pen ink as the address, was a single initial: M.

Marcus. Of course it was Marcus. Nobody else I knew owned a fountain pen, let alone used one to issue a summons disguised as a weekend getaway.

I set the card down next to the toaster and stared at it for a full minute, waiting for the nostalgia to hit. That’s what’s supposed to happen, isn’t it? You get an invitation from your old college crew, and suddenly you’re twenty-one again, smelling cheap beer and autumn leaves, remembering all the stupid, glorious things you did before you had to care about deductibles and lower back pain.

Instead, my stomach dropped straight through the linoleum.

It wasn’t a dramatic, cinematic panic. It was just a cold, quiet certainty that something was wrong. Like realizing you’ve left the stove on three hours after you’ve boarded a plane.

I picked up the card again. November 14–17. That was this coming Thursday through Sunday. Three days' notice. Classic Marcus. He’d always operated under the assumption that everyone else’s schedule was merely a blank canvas waiting for his brushstrokes.

I walked over to the fridge, opened it, and stared at a half-empty bottle of Pinot Grigio, three eggs, and a jar of capers I’d bought for a recipe I never made. I closed the fridge, walked into the living room, and sat down on the futon that had been "temporary" since 2019.

My phone was sitting on the coffee table, face down. When I picked it up, the screen lit up with four notifications, all from a group text that hadn’t existed five minutes ago.

Marcus: Check your mail, children. The mountain calls.

Sloane: If this is a timeshare pitch, I’m blocking your number and billing you for my time.

Leo: Wait, Blackwood Lodge? Didn’t that place burn down?

Marcus: No, Leo. That was the boathouse. Keep up.

I stared at the screen. My thumb hovered over the keyboard, then froze.

The boathouse.

A strange, static buzz filled the back of my skull, like a radio tuned between stations. I knew that word. I knew Blackwood Lodge. We’d gone there during senior year—the five of us. Marcus, Sloane, Leo, Maya, and me. It had been Marcus’s uncle’s place, a sprawling, drafty cabin tucked into the Cascades about two hours outside of Portland. We’d gone up there for a long weekend right before Thanksgiving, back when we still thought we were going to be friends forever, or at least until we figured out how to do our own taxes.

I remembered the drive up. I remembered Leo’s terrible playlist—all nineties alt-rock and obscure Swedish pop. I remembered Sloane complaining about the lack of cell service before we’d even left the highway. I remembered Maya’s laugh, bright and slightly crooked, and the way Marcus had stood on the porch with a bottle of whiskey like he owned the whole damn mountain.

And then... nothing.

Well, not nothing. That was the problem. I remembered the idea of the weekend. I remembered waking up in the backseat of my own car on Sunday morning with a splitting headache and a vague sense that we’d had a really intense conversation about our futures. I remembered Marcus telling me I’d taken a nasty spill on the porch steps after too much tequila, which explained the purple bruise on my temple and the faint, crescent-shaped scar that still lived just beneath my hairline.

I’d accepted that explanation for ten years. People fall down stairs in college. People drink too much cheap tequila and wake up with missing hours. It’s practically a graduation requirement.

Except, sitting there in my quiet apartment, looking at Marcus’s text about the boathouse, I realized I had no memory of a boathouse burning down. Not even a fuzzy one.

My phone buzzed again.

Maya: I’m in.

Just three words. No exclamation point, no emoji. Maya had always been the quietest of us, the one who absorbed everyone else’s chaos and somehow stayed upright. If Maya was going, it meant she didn’t think it was a terrible idea. Or maybe she just didn’t know how to say no to Marcus. None of us ever really had.

Sloane: Fine. Only because I need an excuse to get out of my sister’s engagement party. Someone better bring decent coffee.

Leo: I’ll bring the tequila. For old times' sake.

Marcus: Elena? You alive over there?

I looked at the blinking cursor. I had a dozen very good, very adult reasons to say no. I had a freelance fact-checking deadline on Friday for a true-crime podcast—ironic, considering I couldn’t even fact-check my own twenties. I had a dying Boston fern that needed to be repotted, a dentist appointment I’d already rescheduled twice, and a general, bone-deep aversion to driving two hours into the woods with four people I hadn’t spoken to since Obama’s first term.

Okay, that wasn’t entirely true. I’d seen Sloane’s face on a billboard once when I was visiting Chicago—she was a corporate litigator now, all sharp angles and terrifyingly symmetrical hair. I’d seen Leo’s name in the credits of an indie documentary a few years back, listed as "Additional Sound." And Maya had liked one of my Instagram photos in 2021, a picture of a particularly good croissant I’d eaten in Ballard.

We weren’t strangers. We were just... archived.

I typed out a polite decline. Sorry guys, slammed with work this week. Have a drink for me!

I stared at it. My thumb drifted toward the send button.

Before I could press it, my phone buzzed again. This time it wasn’t the group chat. It was a private message from Marcus.

Don’t bail, Elena. You owe us a weekend. Besides, don’t you want to remember?

I read the sentence three times.

The radiator hissed again, louder this time, like it was warning me. My apartment suddenly felt very small, the walls pressing in with the damp, gray weight of November.

Don’t you want to remember?

It was a weird thing to say. If he’d just meant reminisce, he would have said catch up or relive the glory days. Nobody says don’t you want to remember unless they know you’ve forgotten something.

I deleted my polite excuse. My hands were shaking—just a little, enough to make me miss the y on the first try.

In the group chat, I typed: I’m in. See you Thursday.

By Wednesday night, I had convinced myself I was being paranoid.

That was the thing about working as a freelance fact-checker: you spent forty hours a week looking for discrepancies, for the tiny, structural lies people tell to make their stories sound better. Eventually, you started seeing conspiracy theories in your own laundry pile.

Marcus was just dramatic. He’d always been dramatic. In college, he’d once staged a fake funeral for his Honda Civic when the transmission died, complete with a eulogy and a cooler full of Pabst Blue Ribbon. Of course he’d send a cryptic, wax-sealed invitation and follow it up with a vaguely ominous text. That was his brand.

Still, I packed like I was preparing for a minor siege.

I threw two thick wool sweaters into my duffel bag, a pair of waterproof boots I hadn’t worn since a brief, misguided phase where I thought I’d take up hiking, and three pairs of fleece-lined leggings. I added a flashlight—just in case—and then, feeling slightly ridiculous, tossed in a half-empty bottle of ibuprofen and a spare phone charger.

My apartment looked even sadder when I was leaving it. I’d watered the fern, which responded by dropping three more brown leaves onto the rug, and I’d left a spare key under the mat for my neighbor, Mrs. Gable, in case the radiator finally decided to explode.

I didn’t have a car—living in Capitol Hill meant owning a car was mostly an exercise in paying three hundred dollars a month to watch someone else parallel park into your bumper—so I’d booked a rental from the agency three blocks away. A silver Subaru Crosstrek, which felt appropriately Pacific Northwest.

The guy at the rental counter was nineteen, bored out of his mind, and smelled faintly of peppermint vape juice.

"Going somewhere fun?" he asked, not looking up from his clipboard as he handed me the keys.

"A cabin in Oregon," I said. "With some old college friends."

He finally looked up, giving me a once-over that suggested he thought I was roughly a hundred and four years old. "Sounds... chill. Watch out for the roads past Hood River. They’re saying we might get an early freeze tonight."

"Great," I muttered. "Love a good freeze."

I tossed my duffel into the back, adjusted the mirrors, and sat in the driver’s seat for a moment with the engine idling. The dashboard smelled like artificial pine—ironically, the exact same scent as the air freshener Leo used to hang from the rearview mirror of his beat-up Jetta.

I pulled out onto the street, merging into the late-afternoon drizzle. The plan was to drive down to Portland tonight, crash at a cheap motel near the airport, and head up the mountain first thing Thursday morning so I wouldn’t be navigating switchbacks in the dark.

At least, that was the sensible plan. And if there was one thing I’d learned in the last ten years, it was how to be sensible.

I turned on the radio, scanning past a talk show and a country station until I found something playing indie rock from the early two-thousands. It wasn’t Leo’s Swedish pop, thank God, but it was close enough to make my shoulders tense.

As I merged onto I-5 South, the city lights blurring into long, wet streaks on the windshield, my phone buzzed in the cup holder. I waited until I was in the slow lane behind a semi-truck before glancing down at the screen.

It was a text from Maya. Not in the group chat. Just to me.

Are you driving down tonight?

I tapped the voice-to-text button on the steering wheel. "Yeah, just left Seattle," I said, speaking clearly over the hum of the tires. "Staying in Portland tonight and heading up tomorrow morning. You?"

A pause. The little gray dots appeared, disappeared, and then appeared again.

I’m already in Portland, she wrote. I’ll meet you at the lodge tomorrow. Drive safe, Elena. Seriously.

I frowned at the screen. Seriously. People said drive safe all the time. It was just punctuation for goodbyes. Nobody added seriously unless there was a reason to.

I looked back up at the road, the red taillights of the semi glowing through the mist like a pair of angry eyes.

Ten years. Five friends. One weekend.

I pressed my foot a little harder on the gas, eager to get out of the rain, even if I wasn’t entirely sure what was waiting for me at the other end of it.

The motel near the Portland airport smelled faintly of bleach and damp carpet, which I supposed was better than smelling of damp carpet alone. I’d slept for maybe four hours, tangled in a floral bedspread that felt like it had been woven from recycled plastic bottles, waking up every time a 737 roared overhead. By six-thirty, I gave up on sleep entirely, showered under a nozzle that offered either scalding mist or a lukewarm trickle, and packed my duffel back into the Subaru.

The lobby offered a complimentary breakfast consisting of a basket of bruised apples and a carafe of coffee that tasted like it had been brewed through an old gym sock. I poured myself a cup anyway, added three packets of powdered creamer to mask the bitterness, and carried it out to the parking lot.

The air in Portland was sharper than Seattle’s, the rain having tapered off into a thin, hovering mist that clung to the streetlights. I sat in the driver’s seat with the heater blasting, waiting for the windshield to defog, and checked my phone.

The group chat had been quiet overnight, save for a message from Leo at 2:14 a.m. that just said: Found the playlist. You’re all welcome.

There was nothing else from Maya. Nothing from Marcus.

I put the car in reverse, pulled out onto Airport Way, and merged onto I-84 East.

For the first forty minutes, the drive was easy. The highway ran parallel to the Columbia River, a wide, slate-gray expanse of water flanked by towering basalt cliffs. Even in November, with the trees stripped bare and the sky pressed low like a bruised thumb, the Gorge was massive enough to make you feel pleasantly insignificant. I’d always liked that about Oregon—the way the landscape didn’t seem to care who you were or what stupid mistakes you’d made in your twenties. It just sat there, wet and green and indifferent.

I turned the radio down to a low murmur and let the road hypnotize me.

Ten years ago, we’d made this same drive on a Friday afternoon in November, all five of us crammed into Leo’s 1998 Volkswagen Jetta. I’d been wedged in the backseat between Sloane and Maya, my knees pressed into the back of Marcus’s seat while he argued with Leo about whether they had time to stop for beer in Hood River.

"We’re going to a cabin in the woods, Leo, not a monastery," Marcus had said, turning around to grin at us. He’d been twenty-one, all sharp cheekbones and effortless confidence, wearing a vintage corduroy jacket he’d probably thrifted in Ballard. "If we run out of booze, we’re stuck drinking my uncle’s cooking sherry."

"I’m just saying, the sun goes down at four-thirty," Leo had replied, gripping the steering wheel with both hands. "And your uncle’s driveway is basically a logging road."

"It’s a private road," Marcus corrected. "There’s a difference."

"Yeah," Sloane had muttered from the window, not looking up from her phone. "One of them has a gate we’re going to have to get out and open in the rain."

She’d been right, of course. Sloane was almost always right, which was both her greatest asset as a litigator and the reason she’d been exhausting to share a bathroom with in college.

I remembered Maya laughing at that, leaning her head against my shoulder as the Jetta rattled over the expansion joints of the highway. She’d smelled like vanilla and cheap clove cigarettes—a habit she’d picked up during finals week junior year and sworn she’d quit after graduation.

I shifted in the Subaru’s seat, my fingers tightening on the steering wheel. It was strange how clear those little details were. The smell of cloves. The torn upholstery on the Jetta’s headrest. The way Marcus’s watch had caught the dying afternoon light.

And yet, when I tried to push past the drive, past the moment we’d actually arrived at the cabin, my brain hit a wall of white noise.

I knew we’d stayed until Sunday. I knew I’d fallen on the porch steps—or at least, that was the story I’d carried around for a decade like a smooth, worn stone in my pocket. I’d even told my last boyfriend about it when he’d asked about the tiny crescent scar near my hairline. College, I’d said, shrugging it off. Too much tequila, not enough coordination.

He’d laughed, kissed my forehead, and never asked again.

Why would he? It was a boring story. Boring stories were safe.

I passed Hood River around eight-thirty, the town still waking up under a blanket of low fog, and took the exit that curved south toward Mount Hood. Almost immediately, the landscape changed. The wide, flat expanse of the river gave way to dense stands of Douglas fir and ponderosa pine, the road narrowing to two lanes that climbed steadily upward.

The temperature gauge on the dashboard dropped from forty-two degrees to thirty-eight, then thirty-five.

I slowed down a little, watching the shoulders of the road. The rain had stopped completely, replaced by a damp, biting chill that made the asphalt gleam darkly. Patches of frost clung to the shaded ditches, white and crystalline like spilled salt.

By nine-fifteen, I’d reached the turnoff for Zigzag, a tiny cluster of timber-frame buildings, a closed-up ski rental shop, and a gas station that looked like it hadn’t been updated since the Carter administration.

I pulled into the gas station, partly because the Subaru’s tank was down to a quarter, and partly because my bladder was staging a protest against the motel coffee.

The pumps were old-school, the kind with mechanical numbers that clicked loudly as they rolled over. I topped off the tank, shivering in my wool coat as a gust of wind swept down from the mountain, carrying the sharp, unmistakable scent of pine needles and impending snow.

Inside, the station smelled like stale nacho cheese and motor oil. A guy in a faded flannel shirt was leaning on the counter behind a rack of beef jerky, scrolling through his phone. He didn’t look up when the bell above the door jingled.

I used the restroom—a cramped, freezing cubicle with a flickering fluorescent tube—and then wandered the aisles, grabbing a bottle of water, a bag of salted almonds, and, on impulse, a cheap Bic lighter from the display near the register.

"Heading up the pass?" the clerk asked as he scanned my items, finally glancing up.

"Just past it," I said, pulling out my debit card. "Blackwood Road."

His hand paused over the register for a fraction of a second. Just long enough for me to notice.

"Didn't think anyone was up there this time of year," he said, bagging my almonds. "Most of those summer places are winterized by October."

"It’s a friend’s uncle’s place," I said, tapping my card against the reader. "We’re just doing a weekend thing."

He nodded slowly, handing me the receipt. "Well, keep an eye on the weather. They’re calling for a drop tonight. Freezing rain, maybe a couple inches of snow above three thousand feet. Road gets slick up by the timberline."

"Thanks," I said, forcing a polite smile. "I’ll be careful."

I walked back out to the Subaru, tossed the bag onto the passenger seat, and climbed in. Before I put the car in drive, I glanced at my phone.

Two bars of LTE. Slowly flickering down to one.

I opened the group chat. Still nothing new. I thought about texting Maya—Just passed Zigzag, almost there—but my thumb hovered over the screen and then pulled back. What was the point? I’d see her in twenty minutes.

I tossed the phone into the cup holder, shifted into drive, and pulled back out onto the highway.

Ten miles past the gas station, the paved road gave way to the forest service turnoff.

I almost missed it. The wooden sign for Blackwood Road was weathered to the color of driftwood, half-obscured by a low-hanging hemlock branch. I hit the brakes a little too hard, the Subaru’s tires skidding slightly on the wet gravel shoulder before catching, and swung the wheel to the right.

The change was instantaneous.

The highway vanished behind a wall of towering evergreens, and the world shrank to a narrow ribbon of packed dirt and crushed rock. There were no guardrails here, no painted lines, no streetlights. Just trees—massive, ancient trunks slick with dark moss—pressing in from both sides like a silent audience.

I shifted into a lower gear and crept forward at fifteen miles an hour.

The road wound upward in tight, unforgiving switchbacks. Every time I rounded a blind curve, my stomach gave a little lurch, half-expecting to see another car barreling down toward me. But there was nothing. No tire tracks in the frost, no dust hanging in the air. If Marcus, Sloane, Leo, or Maya were already up here, they’d arrived hours ago, or maybe they were still behind me.

Don’t you want to remember?

Marcus’s text popped back into my head, uninvited.

I turned the radio off completely. The sudden silence inside the cabin was heavy, broken only by the rhythmic crunch-crunch of the tires on the gravel and the low hum of the engine.

As I climbed higher, the mist thickened into a low-hanging fog that wove between the tree trunks. Visibility dropped to maybe fifty feet. I clicked on the headlights, watching the beams cut pale, milky tunnels through the gray.

And then, rounding a sharp hairpin turn where the trees briefly parted to reveal a steep drop-off into a ravine, it hit me.

It wasn’t a memory, not really. It was a sensation—a sudden, violent spike of cold right behind my eyes, sharp enough to make me gasp and jerk the steering wheel an inch to the left.

For half a second, I wasn’t in the silver Subaru. I was standing in the dark, my lungs burning with cold air, the smell of wet ash and pine smoke thick in my throat. Someone was shouting—a voice ragged with panic, though I couldn’t tell if it was a man’s or a woman’s—and there was a bright, terrible glare of orange light flickering against the trees.

I slammed on the brakes.

The Subaru slid a few feet on the loose gravel before shuddering to a stop, angled slightly toward the ditch.

I sat there, both hands gripping the wheel so hard my knuckles turned white, my heart hammering against my ribs like a trapped bird. My breathing was shallow, loud in the quiet car.

I stared out the windshield at the empty, fog-shrouded road. There was no orange light. No smoke. Just the gray mist drifting lazily through the pines and the faint, metallic taste of adrenaline in my mouth.

"Get a grip, Elena," I muttered aloud. My voice sounded thin, unfamiliar.

It was just the altitude. Or the lack of sleep. Or the fact that I’d spent the last forty-eight hours obsessing over a cryptic text from a guy who used to stage funerals for his Honda Civic.

I took a slow breath, held it for four seconds, and let it out. When my hands stopped shaking, I shifted back into drive and eased the car forward.

Five minutes later, the trees thinned out slightly, and I saw the gate.

It was a heavy iron bar painted a chipped, peeling green, anchored between two thick timber posts. Just like Sloane had predicted ten years ago, someone would have had to get out in the rain to open it.

Today, however, the gate was already swung wide, chained back against the left post.

Beside it, nailed crookedly to a cedar tree, was a small wooden plaque with faded black lettering: BLACKWOOD.

I slowed to a crawl as I passed through the gate. The driveway beyond was narrower than the forest road, little more than two deep ruts carved into the pine needles, bordered by overgrown ferns deadened by the frost.

I followed the curve of the drive for another hundred yards, the trees arching overhead like a tunnel, until the canopy suddenly broke.

And there it was.

Blackwood Lodge sat in a small clearing at the edge of a steep ridge, looking exactly like it had ten years ago, yet somehow smaller, darker, and far more neglected. It was a sprawling two-story A-frame built from heavy cedar logs, with a wrap-around porch sagging slightly at the corners and a massive stone chimney rising from the center of the roof.

No smoke curled from the chimney.

The windows were dark, reflecting the gray sky like blank eyes.

I pulled into the gravel turnaround in front of the porch and put the car in park, leaving the engine idling for a moment.

The clearing was empty. No other cars. No Marcus standing on the porch with a bottle of whiskey. No Leo unloading guitars or coolers from a trunk.

Just the wind moving through the pines, and the quiet, unmistakable feeling that I had arrived at a party nobody else had bothered to show up for.

I turned off the ignition, unbuckled my seatbelt, and reached for the door handle.