Somewhere near the shoreline something moved through the brush and then stopped when I stopped. The lake answered itself softly against the dock posts. The cabin did not care that I had arrived broken. It sat exactly as it always had—quiet, stubborn, built to outlast other people’s urgency.
There was a rock by the woodpile.
It took six hits to break the lock.
The first few did almost nothing except send pain up my arm and stir that old humiliating feeling that maybe I was doing it wrong. By the fourth strike the bracket loosened.
By the fifth I was breathing harder than the work deserved, not because breaking a lock is exhausting, but because I had spent the last two weeks not hitting anything, not shouting, not collapsing where anyone could see.
Some part of me had apparently been waiting for something lawful to destroy. On the sixth hit the lock split and dropped to the porch with a dead metallic crack.
I stared at it with the rock still in my hand and felt more tired than victorious.
Then I opened the door.