The man with the sluice box… the one who’d watched her, not the water.
A chill rippled her skin.
Same build?
Same stillness?
Same wrongness?
She didn’t know.
But she knew this:
He hadn’t come to steal.
He’d come to look.
Heather set Byrdie gently on the bed and pulled on jeans beneath her robe. Boots next. Not to go outside—she wasn’t suicidal—but to do something other than stand frozen.
She made a slow lap of the upstairs hall. Listened at the landing. Watched from the stairwell. Glenoran breathed around her, old and stubborn and familiar.
Back in her room, she left the curtains half-drawn and sat at the foot of the bed. Phone face-down on her thigh.
She could call Flynn. He’d be here in an hour, storming through any man who dared walk her garden.
She could call the police. Report “a suspicious figure” and answer the polite confusion of a constable who’d never heard of Glenoran House.
But instead she sat very still.
And let the truth settle:
Whoever he was, he wasn’t after the house.
He was after the story.
Her mother’s story.
Herstory.
She picked up Byrdie again, the cat’s heartbeat quick beneath her palm. “All right,” she whispered. “If you’re watching me, then watch me walk forward.”
Tomorrow she’d lock up Eilidh’s papers, speak to Dr. Flora Henderson, and drag every shadow into daylight.
But tonight she turned off the overhead lamp, leaving only the warm pool of gold from the bedside light.
A lighthouse glow in a house built to withstand storms.
She lay back down, Byrdie curled into the hollow of her arm, and let the dark become just a room again.
Chapter 17
Fiona Cameron—Inverness 1746
The wynd behind the tavern still reeked of whisky, piss, and fear.
Fiona pressed her back to the cold stone wall, breath coming fast as redcoat boots thundered through the tavern’s front room. Harris had shoved her through the kitchen door with one sharp, unarguable command—
“Stay put. Dinna move.”
