Hidden Ivy.

Chapter 1: part 1.

[CHAPTER NOTE]

This chapter sets off everything... you'll see why later.

Ivy thought the first time she saw him was outside the supermarket on a rainy Thursday in February.

A tall boy stood across the road, dressed entirely in black, watching the entrance.

She looked away to answer a text.

When she looked back...

He was gone.

***

Ivy Morgan was late for college. Again.

She jolted awake to the violent buzz of her phone on the nightstand, not her alarm, which had apparently given up on her. She squinted at the time.

8:42 a.m.

"Oh crap."

She swung her legs out of bed, heart already sprinting, and rushed to the bathroom. Toothbrush in one hand, phone in the other, she jabbed at Hudson's contact.

He answered immediately.

"Where the heck are you? I look insane waiting out here."

"I overslept," she mumbled around toothpaste, hopping into her black jeans. "Make something up: family emergency, dead goldfish, whatever."

She hung up before he could complain.

Hair tie. Boots. Bag. She flew down the stairs.

"Bye!" she shouted.

Her father didn't look up from his laptop.

She slammed the front door behind her, dove into her car, and jammed the key into the ignition. The engine coughed awake. Ivy tore out of the driveway, adrenaline buzzing through her veins.

Blackwater Ridge blurred past her windows - the same pine-lined roads she'd known her whole life. But lately, they didn't feel familiar. They felt watchful.

Three weeks had passed since Samantha Blake vanished without a trace. Three weeks filled with rumours, search parties and a town determined to pretend everything was fine.

Ivy kept her eyes wide open now. Her senses sharp. Her foot steady on the accelerator.

Because Sammy wasn't the first.

She hadn't known Sammy well - just a familiar face around campus; a girl Ivy had sometimes seen ordering caramel lattes at The Roast - but her absence clung to the town like damp air. Everyone had a theory. None of them made sense.

Some said she'd run away after her parents split up over the summer. Others whispered that she'd been abducted by aliens - which was ridiculous. The rumour Ivy found most believable was also the darkest: a newcomer had stalked Sammy, taken her, and killed her.

She didn't know why that theory felt right. She hated that it did, because if it was true, no one was safe.

Since January, three other people had gone missing within a fifty-mile radius. No bodies. No clues. No suspects. The police searched for Sammy for a week - posters, press conferences, patrol cars crawling through the woods - then everything went quiet.

Too quiet.

Sammy had left nothing behind. No note. No packed bag. No sign she'd planned to leave. One day she was here. The next, she wasn't.

Hudson insisted she'd run off with her foreign boyfriend, eloping to whatever country he came from.

Ivy didn't believe that. Not when the air in Blackwater Ridge felt wrong. Not when the woods seemed to swallow sound. Not when the town had started acting like Sammy was already dead. If Sammy could vanish, so could anyone.

Something was happening - something no one wanted to say out loud.

After her final lecture, Ivy spent almost an hour helping arrange the gym for Monday's memorial. By the time the last metal chair was in place, the rows stretched across the polished floor like an audience waiting for someone who might never return.

Three weeks missing, and already the town was preparing to mourn.

A bit morbid, Ivy thought. It wasn't long enough to assume someone was dead. Not when there was no body. No belongings. No answers.

But the posters were already fading. The rumours were growing. And the empty spaces Sammy and the others had left behind remained.

Ivy gathered her bag, tucked her jacket beneath her arm and slipped into the bathroom.

The fluorescent lights buzzed overhead, flickering once before settling into a harsh, cold glow.

She stood at the mirror, fingers gripping the sink.

She didn't want to go home. She didn't want to sit in the quiet house on the edge of town, pretending everything was normal. She wanted noise. People. Her friends. Anything that didn't feel like the gym - rows of chairs waiting for a girl everyone had already buried in their minds. Anything that kept her from thinking about how close the town felt to breaking, and how close she felt to it.

She splashed water on her face, wiped it with her sleeve, and tried to steady her breathing.

The mirror behind her flickered. Just once. Just enough to make her turn.

Nothing.

Just the empty bathroom. The hum of the lights. The faint smell of bleach.

Ivy stared at herself in the bathroom mirror, trying to see something extraordinary. She didn't.

Ordinary, she thought. Angst. Acne. Hormones. Nothing special. Nothing strange.

Normal.

She lived in a small house on the edge of town with her father and grandfather - two men who loved her, protected her, and never talked about the one person she wanted answers about. Her mother. Anna.

A name without a face.

Ivy had no memories of her. No photos. No belongings. No stories. No one in Blackwater Ridge ever mentioned her, as if the woman had been erased from the town's history. As if Ivy had been left with a missing piece she could never name.

Ivy leaned closer to the mirror, searching for any trace she might have inherited - a familiar curve of a cheekbone, a shape of an eye, something. Nothing.

Her grandfather, Bill, had lived in Blackwater Ridge his entire life, but he never spoke about the town's past. And Blackwater Ridge had a past - one steeped in rumours, disappearances, and whispered stories people only shared when the lights were on.

The town sat on the northwestern coast of Oregon, surrounded by mountains, forests, and miles of empty roads. It was the kind of place people left after graduation, not the kind they moved to. Ivy knew every shortcut, every abandoned trail, every place teenagers went when they wanted to be alone.

But she didn't know everything.

Nobody did.

There was one place in Blackwater Ridge everyone avoided talking about.

The old derelict manor on the cliffs.

Ivy had never understood why the thought of it unsettled her. She had never even visited the place. But with Sammy missing, it bothered her more than ever, because the town's silence suddenly felt dangerous.