Emma didn't answer Agatha's letter right away.
She carried it with her through the rest of the holidays, tucked into the same drawer as Vivian's journal, taking it out every few days to reread the careful, measured handwriting as though it might reveal something new each time. Two teenagers have gone missing there in the past six months alone. The sentence sat heavy in her chest through Christmas morning, through the quiet, snow-bright days between the holidays, through the first nervous week of January back at school.
It was Cassidy who finally brought it up directly, cornering Emma in the library during a free period in mid-January, sliding into the seat across from her with the same no-nonsense directness she'd used the day she'd first noticed something was wrong, months before.
"You've been carrying that letter around for three weeks," Cassidy said. "I can tell by the way you keep touching your bag every time somebody mentions Vermont in geography class. Just talk to me about it instead of chewing on it alone."
Emma sighed and pulled the folded letter from her bag, sliding it across the table. Cassidy read it slowly, her expression tightening with every line.
"Two teenagers," she said quietly, once she'd finished. "In six months. That's fast, Emma. Faster than whatever pattern the Ashgrove house followed."
"I know," Emma said. "That's exactly what's been keeping me up at night. If this Ashford Hollow thing works even remotely the same way ours did, six months for two disappearances isn't just unusual. It might mean whatever's out there is a lot hungrier, or a lot less patient, than what we dealt with."
"Or it's not the same kind of thing at all," Cassidy pointed out. "Agatha said herself she doesn't actually know yet. Maybe it's nothing like Hollow Lane. Maybe it's just a coincidence, or something ordinary and terrible that has nothing to do with entities and marks and any of this."
"Maybe," Emma agreed. "But I don't think we get to just assume that, not after everything we learned this fall. Not when there might be a family out there right now going through exactly what Renee went through for ten years, or what Nana Ruth went through for sixty."
Cassidy studied her for a long moment. "You've already decided," she said. "Haven't you."
Emma was quiet for a moment, turning the truth of it over honestly before answering. "I think I decided the moment I read Agatha's letter," she admitted. "I just needed some time to actually be ready to say it out loud. I don't want this to be my whole life, Cass. I want to finish high school. I want to have an ordinary spring, and an ordinary graduation, and figure out what I actually want to do with myself beyond all of this. But I also don't think I can just sit here in Ravenswood, knowing what I know now, and pretend I don't have anything to offer a family who might be living through exactly what we went through."
"So what does that actually look like?" Cassidy asked. "You're not just going to run off to Vermont on a school night."
"No," Emma said, allowing herself a small, tired smile. "I think it looks like calling Agatha tonight, and telling her we want to know more before we decide anything bigger. Carefully. The way we did everything with the Ashgrove house slowly, together, with everyone's eyes open before we commit to walking through anyone else's gate."
The Call
That evening, Emma called Agatha from her bedroom, Cassidy sitting cross-legged on the bed beside her for support, both of them listening on speakerphone as Agatha picked up on the second ring, her voice carrying its usual brisk, careful energy.
"I wondered how long it would take you to call," Agatha said, without any preamble. "I assume you've read my letter more than once by now."
"More than a few times," Emma admitted. "We want to know more. Not commit to anything yet just understand what we're actually looking at before deciding whether Ashford Hollow needs the kind of help we gave Ravenswood."
"That is precisely the correct approach," Agatha said, sounding genuinely pleased. "I have already begun a careful correspondence with the local historian who first reached out to me a man named Walter Prescott, who has apparently been quietly documenting strange occurrences around Ashford Hollow for the better part of a decade, largely ignored by both the local police and his own town council. I can share what he's sent me so far, if you're both ready to see it."
"Please," Emma said.
Over the following twenty minutes, Agatha walked them through what she'd learned a rural Vermont town of barely eight hundred people, built around an old textile mill abandoned since the 1970s, with a documented history of disappearances stretching back, according to Walter Prescott's careful research, at least as far as the 1930s. Unlike the Ashgrove house's clear fifty-year cycle, the Ashford Hollow pattern seemed erratic, unpredictable, sometimes claiming someone every decade, sometimes going nearly thirty years without a single incident until, apparently, the past six months, during which two teenagers had vanished within eleven weeks of each other.
"That irregularity concerns me most of all," Agatha admitted. "If this is the same category of entity we faced at Hollow Lane, an unpredictable feeding pattern suggests something considerably less stable, and possibly less bound by the kind of clear rules we were eventually able to exploit against Thomas."
"Less stable could mean more dangerous," Cassidy said.
"It could," Agatha agreed. "Which is precisely why I have no intention of walking either of you, or myself, into that town unprepared. I have asked Walter Prescott to gather everything he can about the mill's history, and about the families of both missing teenagers, before we make any decisions at all about traveling there directly."
Emma felt something settle in her chest, steady and clear despite the fear still coiled underneath it not the reckless, desperate courage that had first sent her alone through the Ashgrove gate, but something more deliberate, more prepared, built out of everything she'd learned surviving Hollow Lane.
"Then let's start there," she said. "Carefully. The way we should have from the very beginning, if anyone had known enough to warn us."
A New Beginning
She hung up the phone a while later, the weight of the decision settling differently than she'd expected not as dread, exactly, but as something closer to purpose. Cassidy squeezed her hand gently, her expression a careful mixture of worry and quiet determination.
"You know I'm not letting you do this one without me either," Cassidy said. "Not after everything. Not after Hollow Lane taught us both exactly what happens when someone tries to face this alone."
"I wouldn't want to," Emma said honestly. "Whatever's waiting in Ashford Hollow, if it's real, if it's anything like what we already survived I think we're going to need every single person who was in that basement with us in October. And I think, this time, we're going in already knowing something Vivian never had the chance to learn until it was almost too late."
"What's that?" Cassidy asked.
Emma looked out her bedroom window, at the quiet, snow-covered street below, and thought of the mark that had once spread dark and cold across her arm, and of the small, frightened voice that had finally, gratefully, let itself rest.
"That the hardest part was never actually beating whatever's out there," she said quietly. "It was refusing to face it alone. Everything else, we can figure out as we go. But that part, at least we already know how to do."
Outside, the January snow continued falling steadily over Ravenswood, and somewhere many miles to the north, in a small Vermont town built around the ruins of an old textile mill, something patient and unstable and hungry continued waiting, entirely unaware that the same girl who had once closed a hundred-year-old door in her own hometown had just quietly decided that Ashford Hollow's turn was coming next.