They work in silence for a while.The kind that isn’t awkward but isn’t comfortable either, charged, alert.Callum reads dates aloud when something catches his attention.Isla matches them against memory, against her mother’s carefully tailored timeline.
“He was in Denver when I was ten,” Isla says slowly, staring at a receipt.“My mother said he was overseas that entire year.”
Callum’s jaw tightens.“Denver’s a day’s drive from where you lived then.”
“A short flight,” Isla adds.
They exchange a look.
Not triumph.Not vindication.
Something heavier.
She shoves the folder aside.“I don’t like this.”
Callum gives a humorless smile.“Neither did he, whenever facts got involved.”
Isla pushes back from the desk, suddenly restless.She paces the room, arms folded tightly across her chest.
“I’ve spent my entire life believing one story,” she says.“It’s shaped everything, how I work, how I plan, how I leave before people can leave me.”
Callum watches her carefully.“And now?”
“Now the story has cracks,” she snaps.“And I don’t know what’s underneath.”
He nods.“That’s usually the worst part.”
She stops pacing near the window, staring out at the way the trees reached for the sky.“Why are you helping me?”
Callum doesn’t answer right away.
“When I was younger,” he says finally, “I believed loyalty meant protecting someone’s reputation at all costs.”
“And now?”
“Now I think loyalty might mean telling the truth, even when it ruins the myth.”
Isla turns back to him.“That could cost you the castle.”
A flicker of something dark crosses his expression.“It already has.”
The admission lands harder than she expects.
She moves back to the desk, slower this time, more careful.The photograph waits in the drawer like a quiet accusation.She doesn’t take it out again.
Instead, she opens the leather notebook.
Keir’s handwriting fills the pages, slanted, impatient, restless.Musical notations bleed into half-sentences.Ideas abandoned mid-thought.
And then?—
Her name.
Isla freezes.
It isn’t a dedication.It isn’t poetic.Just a line in the margin:
Isla, piano here, not guitar.
