You don’t need that.
You don’t want that.
Trust me.
Isla presses her palm flat against her chest.
Her mother never forbade her from feeling anything outright.That would have been too obvious.Instead, she’d organized Isla’s life so efficiently that feelings became inconvenient side effects, things to be managed, postponed, or quietly outgrown.
Music had been allowed because it could be shaped into discipline.Grief had been tolerated because it sharpened ambition.Anger had been redirected because it fueled excellence.
But questions?
Questions were dangerous.
Isla stands abruptly, the bench scraping softly behind her.She paces the length of the music room, bare feet whispering against stone.The castle feels different now, less like an inheritance, more like a provocation.
You’ve stayed long enough.
The words echo.
Her mother never saidcome home because I miss you.She saidcome home because this is disruptive.
Isla laughs softly, the sound edged and humorless.
“I won’t,” she says to the empty room.“Not this time.”
The decision settles into her bones with surprising steadiness.
She isn’t leaving.Not because of the will.Not because of Keir.
Because something here frightens her mother enough to reach across an ocean and tighten the leash.
That thought sends a sharp, electric clarity through her.
Isla grabs her sweater from the back of the chair and strides out of the room.
She doesn’t hesitate.She doesn’t second-guess herself.
She goes straight to Keir’s office.
The office looks smaller in the late afternoon light.
Or maybe Isla is bigger now, angrier, sharper, less willing to move carefully through a space that suddenly feels complicit.
She opens the drawers she skipped earlier.Pulls folders apart with impatience.The neatness that once impressed her now irritates her.This room is not neutral.It is cultivated silence.
“This is ridiculous,” she mutters, flipping through correspondence that leads nowhere.
Contracts.Royalties.Schedules.
All the proof of a life lived loudly, publicly, everywhere except where she was.
Her throat tightens.
Isla shoves one folder aside and opens another.This one thinner.Older.The paper smells faintly of dust and time.She skims quickly, irritation building.
Nothing.
