Tŷ Brân

Tŷ Brân — "Crow House" — is the last cottage on a dead-end track in the green silence of mid-Wales.

Iwan Pryce is twenty-nine, freshly single and quietly tired of his own life when he matches with Mara on a dating app. She is beautiful, funny, unhurried, and she sees him in a way no one ever has. When she drives down from the hills to meet him in Cardiff, he falls fast, and completely.

Her village has broadband and a Tesco Express, a school run and a Michelin-starred restaurant. It also has a community that goes very still whenever her name is said aloud. The locals try to warn him, in fragments, at the school gate, over the bar, and it seems to cost them something to do it. In the lower field below her bedroom window a scarecrow stands among the long grass, and every morning Iwan counts the figures beside it, and every morning there seem to be one or two more.

The deeper he falls, the thinner he becomes. His messages stop arriving. His friends misremember him. His employer has no record he was ever there. And still he goes back to her, because Mara is the only one in the world who can still see him at all.

Some doors open only one way. By the time Iwan understands what is waiting for him at the end of the track, the question is no longer whether he can leave.

It isn't you who walks away.