Sunflowers blurred past in the early morning sunlight as Daniella flew down the county road on her road bike. At eight in the morning it was already hot enough that she was sweating just ten miles into her ride. If she had a dollar for every time someone told her "it's hot here, but it's a dry heat," she'd have paid off the ridiculously expensive bike she'd gotten when she joined Shannon's triathlon team. Dry heat or no, it would be hot as the surface of the sun by mid-morning.
Daniella leaned back and coasted for a stretch, letting her teammates pass her while she sipped water. Her body was humming pleasantly with endorphins. Her mind was quiet, focused.
Joining Shannon's community triathlon team had been one of her therapist's suggestions a few months before, and Daniella had to admit it had been a good one. Pushing her body to its limit always turned down the static in her mind. It was how she did most of her best thinking these days.
It had been nice to make new friends, too. Friends who hadn't panicked over her disappearance, mourned her apparent death, and been shocked by her sudden emergence from the woods six months later. Her triathlon friends were content to talk about diets and bike builds and upcoming races. They didn't know about her ordeal. She didn't need to reassure them that she was okay. She didn't have to atone for the damage her disappearance had caused. They were never thrown off by the difference between the Daniella they'd known before and the Daniella who had returned from the Wood. Around them she could just be herself without the weight of her past stifling every interaction.
When she had made her way back from the Wood, she hadn't been prepared for what reentering her life would be like. She hadn't really anticipated the rabid law enforcement and media attention she garnered. It wasn't every day that a pretty young woman went missing in the woods. It was even more rare for that pretty young woman to come traipsing down the mountain six months later in the dead of winter looking healthier than ever without explanation.
The transition back to living in town was slow. She was shocked by how foreign cars felt. They were so loud and the stench of them was everywhere. She was horrified by the amount of garbage she generated no matter how careful she tried to be. Foods she had remembered loving were now too sweet, too fatty, too salty, too fake.
By far the worst part about coming back was the people.
It hadn't taken long before people moved from being grateful she was alive, to angry that she wouldn't share more about where she'd been. The police had interviewed her multiple times in an attempt to get her to admit she'd been kidnapped. When she refused to give them any useful information about her time in the woods, they had made vague and unconvincing threats about obstruction of justice for a few weeks. It was amazing how quickly people went from seeing you as a miracle to a hoax, when you hadn't done anything to encourage either belief. Eventually the authorities had given up making a crime out of her disappearance.
The media had also gotten wind of her story not long after she'd returned. She still wondered sometimes who tipped them off. She couldn't blame them exactly. It was a feel-good story that had quickly turned vaguely salacious and sinister. Logically there was no reason she should have been alive and her refusal to give any interviews made her all the more fascinating. There were dedicated groups of amateur sleuths on Reddit trying to figure out what had really happened to her.
She'd had to completely raze all her online accounts, get a P.O. Box, and buy a new unlisted phone number. She'd been on the verge of changing her name, but things calmed down after a few months and it just didn't seem worth the hassle. On the up side, enough people had been moved by her disappearance and reappearance that a substantial crowd fund campaign had been dedicated to her recovery.
Relations with her family and close friends were still fraught. She had refused to talk about what had happened to her. Her mother was convinced that her ordeal had been so traumatizing that she'd suffered selective amnesia as a coping mechanism. She suspected everyone who had known her had their own theories ranging from her participating in a secret six-month silent yoga retreat to her barely escaping from six months in a murder dungeon. She could understand why they needed an explanation. Without it, her disappearing and not telling anyone she was alive was beyond cruel.
Sometimes Daniella considered telling her parents and closest friends about the Wood. She knew her silence hurt and that what they imagined had happened to her was likely much worse than her real experience in the Wood. If she continued to shut them out, she knew she'd lose them.
Still, she could never bring herself to tell anyone about the faeries. Malachite had kept the Wood secret for hundreds of years. She couldn't bring herself to betray his confidence by telling people American faeries were still alive and thriving. It was an impossible situation, one that had led her to turn to new acquaintances like Shannon and her triathlon team, who either didn't know or didn't care about her disappearance.
She stowed her water bottle and leaned back down on her handlebars, pushing herself into a sprint to catch up with her teammates. Riding a steady wave of endorphins, she let her thoughts take their natural course toward Malachite.
Thinking about him wasn't pure pain anymore. It had eased into a confusing, tangled knot of good and bad. She hadn't forgiven him for lying to her and she still didn't understand why he thought it was okay to keep her in the Wood. Every feeling of betrayal and anger was matched by a memory of the way he was when they were alone together. His smirk. The way he cultivated beauty in his home and in the Wood. The way his eyes gleamed with hunger first thing in the morning as he slid down her body under the sheets. The way his hands felt on her skin, hot and demanding. The way he kept her on the knife edge of pain and pleasure.
She missed him. She missed the secret, knowing looks her gave her. She missed his laugh and the way he teased her. She missed the quiet way he moved in the world, and the way the Wood moved with him. She missed the way he'd made her feel: powerful, and free, and loved.
***
When Daniella got home a thick manila envelope was waiting for her in her mailbox. She tucked it under an arm as she carried her bike up the stairs to her apartment, practically running up the stairs. Once inside she transferred the envelope to her mouth while she hung her bike up on the wall, unwilling to put the package down for even a second.
She took a deep breath and settled herself on her couch. Her hands trembled as she ripped the envelope open and spread the contents on the coffee table. A thrill of vindictive joy ran through her when she saw what was inside. It was even better than she had hoped.
At first when she had come back from the Wood she had thought she wanted her old life back. She wanted to return to the person she had been before she had ever met her Lord. The entire way down the mountain she had somehow expected that she could pick up where she'd left off. She knew that it would be a shock to her friends and family, that she might need to file some paperwork with the university to get herself reinstated as a student, that she might want to make minor changes to her dissertation.
What she'd discovered almost immediately was that there's nothing simple about coming back from the dead. The world had kept turning while she was in the Wood, and more often than not it had moved on without her.
Her fellowship in the ecology program had been gone by the time she'd returned. The department chair was all apologies, and the faculty made an effort to cobble together some funding from different grants so she could continue.
It didn't take long for her to realize that not only had the world changed, but she had also changed. It was hard to care about the science of ecology when she knew faeries who instinctively balanced the natural world's ecosystems perfectly. She herself had started to develop that instinct in the Wood, and going back to pure measurements and data felt absurd.
She had stepped off the path that had been so clear a year ago, and now she realized she was standing on an entirely different path whose destination was getting clearer by the day. But before she could let herself move into that future, she had a few things she needed to set right, starting with the contents of the envelope now spread before her. She made digital back-ups of everything, and then back-ups of her back-ups. When she felt assured she had enough copies squirreled away she gathered everything up and locked the entire package in her safe. It was time to call her lawyer.
***
The morning of her mediation meeting with the university, Daniella couldn't eat. She changed her outfit three times, eventually settling on the clothes she had carefully picked out days before. She paced her apartment until it was time to head to campus and still arrived fifteen minutes early.
Her lawyer arrived shortly after. She had hired Hanna with the unexpected windfall from her crowd funded account. Her firm was over in the city and had won several successful settlements from the university. More importantly, Hanna had a strong record of grinding powerful men under her boot for the things they'd done to women.
They made their way up to the conference room in the university president's offices. Daniella recognized the university's head legal counsel sitting at the massive conference table, flanked by the president, vice president, and ecology department chair. Additional staff were positioned in chairs against the wall behind them, even though there was still room at the table.
Daniella and Hanna took their seats facing the legal counsel. Introductions were made and pleasantries offered, which Hanna returned with stone-faced, monosyllabic responses.
The university legal counsel got the meeting started. "We are all so honored to meet you Daniella. On behalf of the entire campus community, I want to express how grateful we are for your safe return."
Daniella stared hard at him. He had the good sense to hesitate when she didn't even offer a polite smile at his opening bid. After a few seconds he stumbled onward.
"We understand you've had some difficulties integrating back into your studies and we want to assure you that there are a variety of resources the university provides to help you get on track." As he droned on about counseling services, advising appointments and excused leave options it dawned on Daniella just how little the university understood about this meeting. She drew herself up straighter in her chair and her stomach unknotted. They were going to wipe the floor with these suits.
Hanna let the man's speech run its course. When he was finally done, she watched him in silence until he exchanged a confused look with the university vice president sitting beside him. Hanna bent and pulled out a thick folio. She placed it precisely on the table. Next to it she placed her cell phone.
"My client is prepared to file suit against the university for its flagrant disregard for faculty misconduct leading to her six-month disappearance."
"Faculty misconduct?" the university president said, mystified.
Hanna pressed onward without acknowledging him. "You will find here affidavits from six female students who previously raised complaints about Professor Craven's conduct. Daniella herself complained to other faculty members about his views on women, though she never filed a formal complaint."
She unlocked her tablet, revealing a video still of a faculty office taken from a high angle. Without a word of explanation, she hit play. The video showed Professor Craven seated at his desk with Daniella standing in the foreground. Daniella had hidden the camera while he'd been giving a lecture, not really knowing what she'd do with the footage. She was glad she had, but she hated reliving that conversation.
She hadn't wasted time accusing him of sending her to what he believed was her death in order to save himself. He'd sputtered a few excuses before finally throwing his hands up in exasperation. He was a celebrated professor with many unfinished projects awaiting publication. He had grandchildren on the family, a family who depended on him. His work was too important to simply abandon, while she... He said she was expendable in every way possible without outright saying it. And then he had the audacity to threaten her with pulling her funding and burying her dissertation if she brought a complaint against him to the university.
Daniella didn't watch the video. Instead she watched the dawning horror on the university administrators' faces. They watched the video until the end. Daniella could practically see them doing silent, horrific calculations. Was the video enough for a criminal conviction? Probably not. Was it enough for months of negative media attention? Could it kick off a wave of Me Too accusations and lawsuits? Costs and risks were being tallied up. Daniella hoped truth and justice would enter into their calculus somehow, though she wasn't holding her breath.
In the taut silence that followed Hanna slid the tablet to one side, and moved her stack of affidavits into its place. She opened the first one and began to summarize the contents, her audience growing more pale by the minute.
By the end of the meeting Daniella had what she'd wanted. Professor Craven would be fired, stripped of his title and pension, and publicly condemned. As for herself, she'd declined discussing a monetary settlement. She didn't want the university's hush money nor the strings that would come with it. Instead, she asked for the one thing she really needed — a favor from the entomology department.
