Vacation Turns Wolfcation

The knock comes four times, and I already know I've lost. I count them from my desk, forehead resting against the cool edge of my laptop, invoice number forty-one glowing accusingly on the screen. Four knocks. Not the polite double-tap of a delivery driver, not the hesitant single knock of a neighbor asking me to turn down music I don't own the energy to play. Four knocks, evenly spaced, patient as a heartbeat , and some small, exhausted part of me is almost relieved. "I know you're in there, Mar. I can hear you not-breathing through the door." "That's not a thing." "It's absolutely a thing you do." A pause. "I have a key." "You've had a key for three years and you've never used it." "There's a first time for everything." The lock turns. I really do need to change that. Priya sweeps in wearing a yellow raincoat over pajama pants, dragging a suitcase that is decidedly not hers, because mine has been sitting untouched in my closet since my mother's funeral. She takes one look at me, hunched and gray under fluorescent light with three days of unwashed hair, and her whole face does something complicated. "Okay," she says. "That settles it." "Settles what?" "You're coming with me. Right now. Pack a bag." I laugh, the sound scraping out of me rusty and unconvincing. "I have four invoices due by midnight and a client who emails in all caps if I so much as breathe near a deadline." "Your client can survive one week without you." She's already in my bedroom, already yanking open drawers. "I booked us a resort. The Aurelia. It's gorgeous, it's private, it's got a whole cliffside infinity pool, and it does not have wifi strong enough for you to work, which is the entire point." "Priya," "You haven't taken a single day off in two years." Her voice cracks on the last word, and that's what stops me, because Priya doesn't c***k. Priya throws confetti at bad news. "Two years, Marin. Since your mom. You've been paying off a debt that isn't even yours to carry alone, and you look like you're evaporating a little more every time I see you." I open my mouth to argue and nothing comes out, because she isn't wrong, and we both know it. "I can't afford a vacation," I say instead, which is true, and smaller than everything else that's true. "You're not paying for a single cent of it. This is happening whether you fight me or not, so save your energy and just be mad at me on the plane." She holds up my ancient, paint-flecked duffel bag like a trophy. "Ten minutes. Pack like your sanity depends on it, because it does." I want to tell her no. I want to tell her that resting feels like drowning slower instead of faster, that every hour I'm not working is an hour the numbers in my head get louder. Instead I look at my hands, ink-stained and shaking slightly from too much coffee and not enough sleep, and something in me just , gives. "Ten minutes," I say. She whoops loud enough that my downstairs neighbor bangs on his ceiling, which only makes her laugh harder. I'm folding my third sweater when I notice the invoice again, still open on my desk, and beside it, my sketchbook , the good one, the one I don't let clients see because the drawings inside are for no one but me. I don't remember opening it. I don't remember picking up a pencil at all today. But there, in the bottom corner of invoice forty-one, bleeding faintly into the margin where numbers should be, is a symbol I don't recognize. It's not a doodle, not really. It's too deliberate for that , a knot of interlocking lines that fold in on themselves like a signature written in a language I've never studied, layered three, four times over until the paper's nearly worn through. I don't remember drawing it. I stare at it the way you stare at your own handwriting after someone tells you it isn't yours. "Priya," I call out, "did you draw on my desk?" She pokes her head out of the bathroom, toothbrush in her mouth. "Whu?" "Nothing." I tear the corner off before I can think too hard about it, fold it into my sketchbook, and zip the whole thing into the front pocket of my bag. Just tired. Just distracted. My hands do things while my brain is somewhere else; it's not the first time. It won't be the last. It's just a little strange that I can't stop looking at it. The Aurelia doesn't look real. I've seen resort brochures before , glossy, over-saturated, promising things no actual building delivers , but the car crests a hill of impossibly green pine, and there it is, spilling gold light across a valley that shouldn't exist this far from any coastline I know. Turrets of pale stone catch the last of the sunset like they were built specifically to be photographed at this exact hour. The air smells like rain that hasn't fallen yet, and something underneath it, sweeter, floral, wrong for the season. "Told you," Priya says smugly, watching my face. I'm too exhausted to argue, too exhausted, honestly, to be as suspicious as the tight, prickling feeling at the back of my neck insists I should be. I chalk it up to jet lag. To two years of running on fumes finally catching up all at once, now that I've stopped moving long enough to feel it. At check-in, a concierge with unnervingly still eyes hands Priya a room key and looks at me a beat too long before he speaks. "Welcome home, Ms. Calloway." "It's my first time here," I say, laughing it off. His smile doesn't quite move fast enough to catch up with the words. "Of course. My mistake." Priya doesn't seem to notice. She's already confiscating my phone with a triumphant little flourish, dropping it into her purse like contraband, and pressing my sketchbook into my hands instead. "No work email. No invoices. Just this." She taps the cover. "You always come back from yourself when you draw. So draw." I want to tell her I don't feel like myself right now at all. I want to tell her that the concierge's eyes followed us the entire walk to the elevator, and that the flowers lining the lobby , deep violet, star-shaped, blooming in defiance of every season I know , are not flowers I have ever seen anywhere in my life. Instead, I hold my sketchbook against my chest like armor, and follow her into a place that already, somehow, knows my name.