“Stay,” she whispered, the word torn from some deep place inside her.
His arm tightened instantly, his lips brushing her hair. “Try and make me leave.”
The storm battered Glenoran’s walls, but inside the room was only warmth—the thrum of Flynn’s heartbeat, the steady cadence of his breath, the faint scent of rain lingering in the air.
She was home.
Chapter 14
Heather—Present Day
The storm had passed sometime before dawn.
Heather knew it by the hush that lingered: a fragile kind of quiet that felt like the world catching its breath.
Flynn was still asleep beside her, half-buried beneath the tangle of sheets. One arm was draped protectively around Byrdie, who’d somehow claimed his chest as a pillow, tiny paws tucked beneath her chin. The sight stopped Heather in her tracks.
The two creatures who felt most like hers in the world now sprawled across her bed, safe and warm.
She traced a fingertip over Flynn’s shoulder, the muscles shifting faintly beneath her touch. He murmured something in his sleep, pulling Byrdie closer. The tortoiseshell cat purred louder, the vibration curling through the quiet room. Heather smiled, dazed and a little lightheaded from the night before—from his hands, his words, the way he’d looked at her like she was the only thing that had ever made sense.
She could’ve stayed like this forever.
But old habits nudged her to move. She slipped from the bed, tugging her blush robe around her shoulders, and padded downstairs as the old floorboards sighed under her bare feet.
She filled the kettle and leaned against the counter, watching gray light spill through the kitchen window. Everything felt softer this morning, the edges dulled by exhaustion and something dangerously close to peace.
And then memory slid in.
Sunlight through thin kitchen curtains in Millhaven. The scrape of a chair. Her father’s quiet breathing before she’d even spoken. She’d been eight, maybe nine.
She padded in wearing her nightgown, hair tangled from sleep.
“Daddy?”
He hadn’t heard her at first. He was sitting at the table, elbows on his knees, head in his hands. His shoulders trembled once—just once—before he lifted his face to her.
He looked wrong. Not like her dad who always smelled like coffee and Irish Spring and certainty. Smaller somehow. Emptied out.
“Daddy, what’s wrong?” she’d asked, her small voice wobbling.
He swallowed hard, eyes red-rimmed and raw.
“Mom’s been in an accident, sweetheart.”
That was all.
Just the kind of finality a child can’t understand but feels anyway.
Heather blinked, the kettle’s rising hiss snapping her back to the present.
Steam curled upward, ghostlike.
Her fingers tightened on the counter, heart thudding.
Acaraccident, he’d said. Later, when she’d asked. But now she knew better. Her mother hadn’t died on some back road in Chicago. She’d drowned in Scotland—chasing the same truth Heather was chasing now.
Did he know?
