“It doesn’t have to make sense. Not until you see it.”
Wonderful. My scowl returned tenfold, but there was little I could do but keep following Paddy down the mountain until we came to a levelled-out clearing. Surrounded by trees, I didn’t realise how big it was at first, but as we continued forward, I saw the ledge in the mountain was pretty vast.
It was covered in dense pine trees—at least, I figured them for pine. My tree knowledge was fairly limited. Either way, it was green and lush and felt as much like Narnia as the rest of Christmas Mountain.
I couldn’t see a treehouse, though.
“Look up,” Paddy said helpfully.
I gave him the finger, then tilted my head to the sky. A construction that wouldn’t have looked out of place in a fairy tale greeted me. Made of wood and glass, it was built into the biggest tree I’d ever seen in real life, high above us, accessible by a wide staircase made from knotted wood and rope. “The hell is this?”
“Told you,” Paddy said. “It’s Isaac Hawthorne’s treehouse.”
“It’s…epic.”
“Wait till you see inside.” Grinning, Paddy led the way to the bottom of the staircase. “It’s a bit wobbly, but you’re not scared of heights, right?”
I wasn’t, but there was something intimidating about climbing stairs that had once belonged to Fen’s father. I couldn’t say why. There just was. And, actually, the wind rocking the wood beneath my feet had the potential to be terrifying if I hadn’t been so terminally curious about what lay ahead.
We reached the top. Paddy waved me forward to a rustic door and handed me a key. “I don’t know why we keep it locked. It’s not like we’re going to get burgled.”
“It belongs to you now?”
“To be honest, we’re not sure. The land deeds are pretty vague and the key was in the house when we moved in.”
“So it could be Fen’s?”
Paddy shrugged. “Maybe. He’s never mentioned it.”
“You haven’t thought to ask him?”
“I’m a busy man.”
I snorted and unlocked the door. “You could’ve asked his dad when you bought the land.”
“We didn’t know it was here and he never mentioned it either.”
“How do you know it was his then?”
“You’ll see.”
Paddy waved me forward. I turned my back on him and ventured into the treehouse. More wood greeted me, rustic and glorious, and I found myself in what was, in effect, a bedsit. There was a kitchenette, a tiny bathroom, and a leather futon, and then taking up most of the space was a desk built from a tree trunk with cast-iron legs.
The desk was by the window. From the solid wood chair, the view stretched for miles through the dense forest and beyond. It was beautiful, but I was still confused. “Why are you showing me this?”
“Because…” Paddy spun in a slow circle, then settled his gaze on a cupboard tucked against the high wooden ceiling of the treehouse. It was a stretch even for him to reach it, and I expected it to reveal something completely ridiculous—this was Paddy, after all, the man who’d sent me a wooden stag head the size of a small bungalow for my birthday—but inside was a satellite Internet router that looked as though it’d been built for NASA. “This here,” Paddy said, smirking at the way my eyebrows were fast disappearing into my hair, “was Isaac’s answer to building a global distribution network in the middle of nowhere.”
“How do you know that?”
“Because he left a manifesto on how to do it.” Paddy stretched, reached into the cupboard—just—and retrieved a leather-bound notebook. “I mean, I say manifesto, it’s three pages of instructions of how to make the thing work, but he built the network Fen’s still using today, so I figure it panned out.”
I took the notebook from him and flipped through the pages. The handwriting was eerily familiar. I wondered where I’d seen it before, then remembered the offender files I’d trawled through that had been filled with Fen’s similar scrawl and my heart skipped a beat. In a place where I was surrounded by his family history, somehow this hit hard.
The instructions were laced with the same brevity Fen had used in his offender reports—no wasted words or superfluous detail. Pure fact. Apparently it was a Hawthorne thing, and carrying that knowledge made me feel closer to Fen, despite the fact that I was going to leave him soon.
“So…” Paddy said.
I’d forgotten he was there. I blinked and turned to him. “What?”
