Callum wakes to light.
Ashen and thin, filtering through the tall windows like it’s unsure whether it belongs.The castle always wakes before he does, pipes shifting, stone settling, the distant movement of staff beginning their routines.
This morning, something feels… muted.
Not silent.The castle is never silent.
But subdued.As if it’s holding its breath.Waiting to see what happens between him and Isla.
Callum lies still for a moment, staring at the ceiling, letting consciousness return slowly.His body remembers before his mind does, the warmth of another person, the weight of connection, the sense that something had shifted irrevocably the night before.
Isla.
He sits up, rubbing a hand over his face.The bed is rumpled from his sleep.They had slept in her bedroom, and now he feels like he’s sleeping in the wrong room.
Still, unease coils low in his gut.
He listens.
No movement in the corridor.No faint sound of a door opening or closing.No distant music drifted through the stone the way it had the morning before.The way it had every morning since she’d been here.
Yesterday morning.
The wordyesterdayfeels heavier than it should.
Callum swings his legs over the side of the bed and stands, pulling on a shirt as he crosses the room.He tells himself she went for a walk because she needed air.That she needed distance after everything they’d uncovered.
That she’ll come back.
He moves through the castle with measured steps, not rushing, not yet willing to acknowledge what his instincts are already whispering.
The music room is empty.There is no scattered music on the stand.
The piano lid is closed.The bench pushed neatly into place, as if no one had sat there laughing, improvising, sharing something unguarded less than twenty-four hours ago.
The dining room is set, but only for one.
That’s when his chest tightens.
Isla isn’t careless.She doesn’t leave traces unintentionally.She doesn’t half-finish things.If she were here, there would be some sign, an interruption, a disruption, a sense of her presence lingering in the air.
There is nothing.
Callum turns back toward the stairs slowly, dread threading deeper with each step.He takes them two at a time, not running, but no longer pretending this is nothing.
When he reaches her bedroom, he stops short.
The room looks…cold and uninviting.
Not lived in.
Not empty in the way a room is when someone simply steps out, but stripped of the small, human disruptions that mark temporary belonging.The sweater she’d tossed over the chair is gone.The book she’d left on the nightstand is gone.
And then he sees it.
The letter.
It rests on the bed, centered with deliberate care, like a period placed at the end of a sentence that had once promised continuation.Beneath it, a neat stack of documents.
