The following days passed in slow-motion. It was as if time had chosen to mimic the forest's erratic pulse, dragging and skipping without rhyme or reason. We hadn't stepped near the rift again. Not because we were afraid—though we were—but because none of us wanted to admit just how unprepared we might still be.
We were back in the cottage, but something felt off. The cushions were just a little too firm. The lights took a second longer to flicker on. Even the scent in the air was faintly different—pine with a hint of something metallic. Bobby said it was our perception catching up to reality. Jacob just said the cleaners probably changed brands. I didn't argue with either of them.
Every morning began with Bobby scribbling away at his notebooks. The man had practically turned the living room into a makeshift lab, with wires, graphs, and strange circuit boards strewn across every available surface. He'd scavenged components from his backpack and the town's electronics shop to build a new device he called the Temporal Sync Monitor.
"You named it that just to make it sound cool, didn't you?" I asked one evening.
Bobby looked up from his soldering iron, eyes gleaming. "Names matter, Alex. You name things, you control the narrative. That's rule one of theoretical quantum field mapping."
I raised a brow. "Is that a real rule?"
Ambrose, who had just walked in carrying three different flavors of chips and no regard for nutrition, chimed in, "Only in Bobby's Book of Brilliant BS. Volume I."
Jacob, ever the skeptic, had been oddly silent about the whole thing. But I noticed how he watched Bobby when he thought no one was looking. A quiet sort of admiration was tucked behind his furrowed brows. Jacob had been doing his own kind of research—not in notebooks, but in his own way: observing, walking the perimeter of the forest, mapping subtle shifts in shadows, humidity, even the silence itself.
"The birds avoid that side of the woods now," he told me one morning.
"How do you know that?"
"Because they used to chirp over there. And now they don't. Something's changed."
I didn't know what to say to that, so I just nodded. With Jacob, the quiet was often louder than the words.
It had been almost a week since our last descent into the fold, and while the tension had simmered slightly, it hadn't vanished. If anything, it had taken root. We all felt it. Even Ambrose, who joked more than usual but occasionally slipped into silence longer than he used to.
We kept ourselves busy.
Jacob began organizing our gear with militant precision. It was his way of maintaining control. Bobby had set up a grid to measure micro-time fluctuations in the room. He claimed to have recorded a four-second lag between the microwave timer and his stopwatch. That made him giddy for two whole days.
Ambrose started drawing. It was strange at first—we'd never seen him as the artistic type. But then he showed us his sketchpad. Pages filled with strange, foggy renditions of the node, Evelyn's face, the portal, the mark on his arm that had since faded but never really gone. He had drawn a version of us too—all of us standing around a strange, twisted tree that didn't exist in any forest we knew.
"You dreaming again?" I asked him.
"I don't dream," he replied. "Not since we got back. But sometimes, when I close my eyes... it's like I remember things I never saw."
We didn't speak much after that.
It was Evelyn who finally broke the silence.
She arrived without warning, as she always seemed to do. One moment, the room was ours. The next, she was there, leaning casually against the doorway like she hadn't just vanished into the fold days ago with a cryptic warning and half-smile.
"You're not going to find answers waiting for the rift to come to you," she said.
We all froze.
"You came back," Jacob muttered.
She nodded. "Because you haven't asked the right question yet."
Ambrose looked up from his sketchbook. "Alright, riddle me this, time-traveling ghost lady: What is the right question?"
She smiled, but it didn't reach her eyes. "What makes you think this reality is the anchor?"
Silence. The kind that stretches.
Bobby stood slowly, his fingers twitching. "You mean... we might not have come back to our original timeline?"
"I didn't say that," Evelyn said. "I said you haven't questioned what reality you're calling home."
Jacob stepped forward. "You're saying we might still be inside it. The rift."
"I'm saying," Evelyn said, walking to the window and pointing outside, "That not everything you see is as it seems. The forest knows when you're lying to yourself."
I followed her gaze.
And I swear to this day, the tree line had moved.
She left before we could ask more. Just vanished again, like she had never been.
That night, none of us spoke much. But I noticed Jacob double-checking the locks. Bobby stayed up, muttering formulas to himself. And Ambrose—Ambrose drew something that looked like the same cottage, but cracked open like an eggshell, and inside it...
Stars. Endless stars.
We hadn't gone back to the fold.
But the fold...
Maybe it never let us go.