Chapter 3

The phone rang twice before the line clicked open.

"Mom!" Gloria shrieked, the tears coming instantly, hot and furious. "You have to do something! She attacked me!"

In a penthouse office overlooking the Manhattan skyline, Dione Blackburn pulled the phone away from her ear. The shrill sound of her daughter's voice sent a sharp spike of pain directly into her left temple.

Dione closed her eyes and pinched the bridge of her nose.

"Breathe, Gloria," Dione said, her voice a smooth, practiced monotone that commanded boardrooms. "Who attacked you?"

"Haven Watkins!" Gloria sobbed, her voice echoing off the street noise. "She humiliated me in front of everyone! And she knows about Europe, Mom. She told me I was going to be shipped off. I am not going to Europe! I'll starve myself before I get on that plane!"

Dione's eyes snapped open. The headache flared into a pounding drumbeat.

"Gloria, the trust fund stipulations require international exposure," Dione started, slipping into her negotiation voice.

"No!" Gloria screamed, the sound distorting the phone's speaker. "I'm staying here! I'm taking a gap year and retesting! If you make me go, I swear I'll make you regret it!"

Dione let out a long, heavy exhale. The muscles in her neck were tight as steel cables.

"Fine," Dione snapped. "We will discuss a gap year when you get home. Just get in the car."

She ended the call and tossed the phone onto her massive glass desk. It slid and hit a stack of quarterly reports with a loud smack.

The heavy oak door to her office pushed open. Warren strolled in, adjusting the cuffs of his custom Italian suit. He took one look at his wife's rigid posture and sighed.

"What did she break this time?" Warren asked, walking over to the wet bar.

"She's refusing Europe," Dione said, her voice vibrating with suppressed anger. "Because of that trash from the rust belt. That Watkins girl."

Warren poured two fingers of scotch. He didn't look up. "She's a teenager from a trailer park, Dione. She's irrelevant. Gloria is just throwing a tantrum."

"She put her hands on our daughter," Dione hissed, her fingernails digging into the leather of her desk chair.

Two hundred miles away, the rusted shocks of the county bus groaned as it hit another pothole.

Haven sat by the scratched window, watching the decaying husks of abandoned steel mills roll past. The oppressive heat inside the bus smelled of diesel fumes and old sweat.

Brenda reached into her canvas bag. She pulled out a plastic bottle of generic water and pressed it into Haven's hands.

"You shouldn't have provoked her, Haven," Brenda whispered, her eyes darting nervously around the half-empty bus. "Those people... they can ruin us."

Haven gripped the warm plastic bottle. She turned to look at Brenda. Her eyes were completely devoid of fear.

"They can't ruin us if we don't need them," Haven said quietly.

The bus hissed to a stop at the dirt crossroad of South Ridge.

They walked in silence up the steep, unpaved driveway to the farmhouse. The roof sagged in the middle, missing shingles like broken teeth.

Haven pushed open the front door. The hinges screamed.

Brenda walked straight to the cramped kitchen, pulling a bag of bruised potatoes from the pantry.

Haven went into her bedroom. The air was stifling. She dropped to her knees and pulled a heavy, dust-covered Dell laptop from under her bed.

She set it on her desk and pressed the power button. The internal fan roared to life, sounding like a jet engine preparing for takeoff.

Haven connected to the weak, unprotected Wi-Fi from the neighbor's house down the road. She opened the browser. Her fingers flew across the sticky keyboard, pulling up the current market prices for organic produce at Whole Foods and high-end New York restaurants.

Wild Appalachian morels. Sixty dollars a pound. Chanterelles. Forty dollars a pound.

She grabbed a spiral notebook and a dull pencil. She began sketching the wireframe for a Shopify storefront. Clean lines. Minimalist text. High-end aesthetic.

"Dinner!" Brenda called from the kitchen.

Haven closed the laptop. She walked into the kitchen and sat at the wobbly wooden table. A bowl of watery potato stew sat in front of her.

She picked up her spoon, staring at the pale chunks of potato.

"I'm going into the deep woods tomorrow," Haven lied, her eyes locking onto her mother's. In her past life, she remembered seeing a local news segment about an old, reclusive hunter who had stumbled upon a massive patch of wild fungi in a specific, hidden ravine of the South Ridge woods. Back then, it was just background noise to her miserable existence. Now, that memory was their lifeline. "I need to do this, Mom. We need the money."

Brenda dropped her fork. It clattered loudly against her bowl. "No. Absolutely not. The bears are active, and the terrain is too steep. It's too dangerous."

Haven reached across the table. She grabbed Brenda's rough, calloused hand and squeezed it hard.

"I know a safe path," Haven said, her voice flat, leaving no room for argument.

Brenda stared at her daughter. There was a hard, unbreakable steel in Haven's eyes that hadn't been there this morning. Brenda's shoulders slumped. She let out a defeated sigh.

"Fine. But I'm coming with you."

Later that night, Haven stood at the kitchen sink, scrubbing the stew bowls under cold water. She looked out the window at the pitch-black tree line of the Appalachian forest. Her jaw tightened. Tomorrow, the real work began.