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.

The air in the forest was thick, wet, and unseasonably cool for June. Haven adjusted the straps of the woven bamboo basket on her back. The rough material dug into her shoulders through her thin windbreaker. She stepped carefully over a rotting log, her cheap rubber boots sinking an inch into the damp, black soil.

Brenda followed close behind, hugging her jacket tighter as she shivered in the morning chill. She clutched a thick walking stick, her eyes darting nervously at every rustle in the underbrush.

"Watch your step," Haven whispered, pointing to a patch of disturbed earth near a cluster of ferns. "Old snare trap. I read that the hunter from the news segment warned about these still being active." In truth, after her rebirth, she had devoured every survival guide and foraging manual the local library had, terrified of ever being helpless again.

Brenda shuddered, giving the spot a wide berth.

They hiked for another hour, moving deeper into a shadowed ravine where the sunlight barely penetrated the dense canopy. The air here smelled heavily of decaying wood and rich earth.

Haven stopped. Her eyes scanned the base of a massive, dead oak tree.

A vibrant flash of yellow caught her eye.

She dropped to her knees. Nestled in the damp moss was a cluster of golden chanterelles, their ruffled edges perfectly intact.

"Here," Haven said, her voice tight with adrenaline.

She pulled a small, sharp paring knife from her pocket. She didn't rip them from the soil. Months of studying sustainable harvesting methods flashed through her mind, and she carefully sliced the stems right above the dirt line, preserving the mycelium network beneath.

Brenda knelt beside her, her eyes widening as she spotted a patch of honeycomb-patterned morels a few feet away.

For twenty minutes, the only sounds were the soft slicing of the knife and their quiet breathing. The bottom of Haven's basket was quickly filling with hundreds of dollars worth of wild fungi.

Snap.

The sharp sound of a heavy branch breaking under a boot echoed through the ravine.

Brenda gasped, dropping a morel. She scrambled backward, raising her wooden stick like a club.

Haven didn't gasp. Her body went completely still. She slowly stood up, her grip locking around the paring knife. She kept the blade low and hidden against the back of her wrist, her pulse hammering in her ears. All those months steeling herself after her rebirth, all the silent promises never to be a victim again, surged into her coiled muscles.

The thick bushes ten yards away parted.

A man stepped through.

He was tall, broad-shouldered, wearing a dark, unmarked waterproof jacket. But Haven's eyes immediately dropped to his feet. Custom-fitted, Italian leather hiking boots. The kind that cost a month of Brenda's wages.

Delano Lindsey stopped when he saw them. A flicker of genuine surprise crossed his sharp, aristocratic features.

He immediately raised both hands, palms open, showing he was empty-handed.

"Didn't mean to startle you," Delano said. His voice was a deep, resonant baritone that carried easily through the damp air. "I'm just passing through."

Haven didn't relax her posture. Her thumb remained rigid along the handle of the hidden knife.

"You're miles off the main trail," Haven said, her tone ice-cold. "People don't just 'pass through' this deep."

Delano lowered his hands slowly. He hooked his thumbs into the straps of his high-end tactical backpack. A small, canvas foraging pouch hung from his belt.

"I'm looking for the same thing you are," Delano said, his eyes dropping to the basket on Haven's back. "Those are beautiful Morchella esculenta. You found a spot with the perfect seventy-percent humidity."

Haven's eyes narrowed. He knew the Latin name. He knew the exact environmental conditions.

Brenda lowered her stick slightly, her shoulders relaxing at the sight of his calm demeanor. "Good morning," she offered, her voice still shaky.

Delano unzipped a side pocket of his bag. He pulled out a sleek, insulated water bottle and held it out toward Brenda. "You look out of breath, ma'am. Water?"

Before Brenda could reach for it, Haven stepped sideways, physically blocking her mother.

"We have our own supplies," Haven said flatly. "Keep your water."

Delano didn't look offended. He calmly screwed the cap back on and slid the bottle away. His gaze shifted back to Haven, a spark of calculation lighting up his dark eyes. He registered her defensive stance, the way she kept her right arm angled slightly away from her body.

"Fair enough," Delano said. He pointed toward the steep incline to his left. "I'll take the western ridge. You keep the valley. We won't cross paths again."

"See that you stick to it," Haven replied, her voice devoid of any polite inflection.

Delano offered a brief, respectful nod. He turned and walked away, his expensive boots making almost no sound on the wet leaves. Within seconds, the morning mist swallowed him whole.

"He seemed nice," Brenda whispered, lowering her stick completely.

Haven slowly exhaled, letting the tension drain from her fingers around the knife handle.

"People who wear two-thousand-dollar boots in the mud aren't nice, Mom," Haven said, turning back to the oak tree. "They're just bored."

The sun was high and brutal by the time Haven and Brenda emerged from the tree line.

Haven's shoulders burned under the weight of the full basket. Sweat plastered her hair to the back of her neck. They walked down the dirt road toward the farmhouse, the silence heavy with exhaustion.

As they approached the front porch, Haven stopped dead in her tracks.

The deadbolt on the front door was mangled. The metal casing was bent outward, the wood around the frame splintered and raw.

Haven's stomach violently contracted. She dropped the basket onto the dirt.

She grabbed Brenda by the arm, shoving her roughly behind her back. Haven kicked the door. It swung open, slamming against the interior wall with a loud bang.

Titus Boggs sat in the center of their small living room, occupying the only armchair. His gnarled hands rested on the silver head of a heavy wooden cane.

Leaning against the doorframe leading to the kitchen was his grandson, Cletus. Cletus was chewing a thick wad of tobacco, his small, pig-like eyes instantly locking onto the sweat-dampened collar of Haven's shirt.

"What the hell are you doing in my house?" Brenda screamed, pushing past Haven. Her face was flushed dark red with fury.

Titus didn't flinch. He slowly lifted his cane and brought it down hard against the floorboards. The thud echoed in the small room.

"Your house?" Titus sneered, his voice a gravelly rasp. "Your lease is up at the end of the month, Brenda. I ain't renewing it. I'm selling this dirt to the developers."

Brenda's breath hitched. The color drained from her face, leaving her looking sickly pale. This house, the small plot of land behind it-it was everything.

Cletus spat a stream of brown tobacco juice into a plastic cup he was holding. He wiped his mouth with the back of his dirty hand and pushed off the doorframe.

"Now, don't cry, Brenda," Cletus said, his lips peeling back in a yellow smile. He took a step toward Haven. "Grandpa says if Haven here agrees to marry me, we can keep the lease going. Indefinitely."

A wave of pure, physiological nausea hit Haven's stomach. The smell of the tobacco, the sight of his greasy skin-it made her throat close up.

Brenda let out a sound that was half-sob, half-growl. She lunged toward the corner of the room, her hands closing around the wooden handle of a heavy snow shovel.

She whipped around, pointing the rusted metal edge directly at Cletus's face.

"Get out!" Brenda roared, her chest heaving. "I will kill you before I let you touch her!"

Cletus jumped back, his boots slipping on the linoleum. The plastic cup crushed in his grip, spilling brown spit onto the floor.

Titus's face contorted in rage. He pushed himself up from the chair, his knuckles white on his cane.

"You put that down, you crazy bitch!" Titus bellowed. "I'll have the sheriff drag you out of here by your hair! I own this town!"

Haven's face was completely blank. She reached into the pocket of her windbreaker. Her fingers closed around the cheap flip phone she had saved up for at a pawn shop. She flipped it open and held down the record button, activating the voice memo.

She stepped forward, placing her hand firmly over Brenda's trembling fingers on the shovel handle. She pushed it down.

Cletus saw the movement. He thought she was surrendering. His yellow smile returned, wider this time. He took a confident step forward, reaching his dirty hand out toward Haven's face.

"That's a good girl," Cletus muttered.

Haven's arm snapped up. The helplessness of her past life-the years of shrinking back and taking the abuse-ignited into a white-hot, desperate fury. She didn't use a trained fighter's strike. She threw her entire body weight forward, swinging her arm with everything she had, her open palm cracking viciously across Cletus's face. Her fingernails dug in and tore a deep, jagged scratch across his greasy cheek. The sheer, unhinged force of the desperate slap was deafening.

Cletus's head snapped violently to the side. He stumbled backward, crashing into the kitchen table. He collapsed onto the floor, clutching his face, a thick line of blood instantly welling up from where his teeth had bitten through his inner cheek.

Titus roared. He raised his heavy wooden cane high above his head, aiming straight for Haven's skull.

Haven didn't step back. She stepped directly into his space, her eyes burning with a cold, terrifying fire.

"Do it," Haven said, her voice dropping to a deadly, even pitch.

Titus's arms locked in mid-air. The sheer lack of fear in her eyes paralyzed him.