No You Didn't - Screenplay

By the time I sat down to write this, I already knew exactly which forest I wanted to return to.

"Don't Look in the Trees" came first: an adult Skye, a missing father, a folklore she'd spent years trying to outrun. But Appalachian folklore had gotten under my skin by then, and I wasn't done with it. When my Writing for the Screen module gave me the chance to build something new, I didn't want new. I wanted more - more of that forest, more of those rules, more of the dread that lives in the space between what you see and what you're told not to acknowledge. So I went backward instead of forward, and wrote the night that made Skye who she is.

This is Skye at ten years old, camping with her father Matthew in the Great Smoky Mountains - before the missing-persons case, before the journal, before she ever needed to go looking for answers in those same woods as an adult. Here, she's still just a kid who trusts her dad completely, right up until the moment he has to become someone else entirely: a protector willing to bargain with something ancient so his daughter gets to walk away.

Writing this let me dig into a theme "Don't Look in the Trees" could only gesture at from a distance: inheritance. Not just of grief, but of knowledge. Adult Skye spends her story piecing together fragments her father left behind, trying to reconstruct a truth he never got to tell her. This screenplay is that truth, unfiltered, happening in real time. And there's a cruel irony I didn't fully appreciate until I'd written both: the same line that protects Skye as a child - the title of this piece - becomes the exact warning she can't quite shake as an adult, echoing forward through a decade she doesn't remember living through.

I also wanted to explore what "protection" actually costs. Matthew doesn't get to be a hero in the traditional sense here. He gets to make one impossible choice, and the story doesn't let him, or the reader, off easy for it. That's the version of sacrifice I find far more interesting than anything triumphant: quiet, desperate, and irreversible.

This piece is a full screenplay rather than an excerpt - scene headings mark location and time, action lines describe what's happening, dialogue sits below each character's name. It moves fast, built to be seen rather than described.

What follows is where Skye's story actually begins.