Chapter 2
Callum Fraser’s cell phone rings with an insistence that breaks the quiet of the car somewhere outside Glasgow, past the last strip of fast-food lights, past the exit that smells like diesel and boiled peanuts, into that long stretch of highway where the world turns into lanes and sky and the steady hum of tires.
The radio is low, not music, never music when he’s trying not to think, just voices filling the air without asking anything of him.
His phone buzzes against the console.
He glances down. Unknown number.
He should ignore it. He’s due in Dumfries by late afternoon for soundcheck, and he’s already behind. But the number flashes again, insistent, and something in his gut tightens as if it recognizes trouble before his brain does.
He answers through the steering wheel button. “Yeah?”
A pause. Not the breathless pause of someone lost, not the awkward pause of a wrong number. A pause that feels… careful.
“Mr. Fraser?” a man asks.
Callum’s grip tightens. “Speaking.”
“This is Andrew Bell of Bell it sounds too calm, too steady, as if he’s pretending this is a normal call.
The pause returns. Longer.
“I’m very sorry to tell you that Mr. MacLaren passed away late last night. It appears to have been a heart attack.”
The world doesn’t explode. It tilts.
For a second, Callum thinks the words didn’t land. That the sentence slid past him without meaning. Heart attack. Passed away. Late last night.
“No,” he says, so quietly he almost can’t hear it over the tires. “No. That’s not possible.”
“I’m very sorry.”
Callum pulls the car onto the shoulder without signaling. Gravel crunches beneath the tires. The car shudders, then stills. He stares straight ahead at a smear of sky and the blur of trees, hands locked on the wheel like it’s the only thing keeping him upright.
“You’ve got the wrong man,” he says. “You must.”
“I assure you, Mr. Fraser—”
“I talked to him three days ago.” The words come out sharp. “He was, he was fine. He was complaining about my setlist and telling me to sleep more. He doesn’t just—”
Die.
The word jams in his throat like a bone.
“We’ve confirmed his identity,” Bell says gently. “Emergency services responded, but he was pronounced dead at the scene.”
Callum’s forehead drops against the steering wheel. The horn gives a short, pathetic sound, like the car is mocking him.
Keir is dead.
The man who had been more than a mentor. More than a bandmate. More than a legend. The man who had been – when Callum was fourteen, and the world had decided he was a lost cause – his lifeline.
Callum breathes in once, but it doesn’t feel like air. It feels like emptiness.
Bell keeps talking, words turning into mush, arrangements, immediate matters, the estate, the need for Callum to return as soon as possible.
“Home,” Bell says at one point, and that one word slices through Callum with a clean, ruthless edge.
Home.
Not the flat his mother had moved him into when she remarried and decided she needed her new husband more than she needed her son.
Not the boys’ school with its locked doors, rules, and quiet cruelty.
Home was stone walls and cold hallways and a fire always burning in the hearth.
Home was Keir MacLaren swearing at the kettle and strumming a guitar at midnight like sleep was optional.
Home was being hauled out of a place that smelled like bleach and punishment, and being told, without softness, without pity—
You’re coming with me.
“You understand?” Bell asks.
Callum lifts his head slowly. His eyes burn. He swipes at his face, furious at the betrayal of tears.
“Yeah,” he croaks. “I understand.”
“I’ll be at the castle when you arrive,” Bell says. “There are legal matters we must discuss. And…someone else.”
Callum frowns. “Someone else?”
Bell hesitates. “We’ll speak when you get here, Mr. Fraser.”
The line goes dead.
Callum sits in the silence, as if he’s waiting for the solicitor to call back and correct himself.
Keir is dead.
The sentence repeats in his head, useless, impossible, obscene. For the last week, he’d been on the road performing at different pubs, playing and doing what he loved.
And now he would be returning to an empty castle.
A truck roars past on the highway, wind buffeting the car. The world keeps moving. The world is disrespectful like that.
Callum laughs once, a short, broken sound. “Fuck,” he whispers.
He turns the car around.
He drives like a man chasing a ghost.
Hours compress. Gas stations blur into one another, bright aisles, bitter coffee, fluorescent lights that make his skin look sick. He doesn’t remember eating. He remembers buying something wrapped in plastic, taking two bites, and throwing it away because it tasted like cardboard and grief.
As the miles pass, his mind returns to the crash that changed his life.
Callum is twelve again, sitting on the floor of a living room that smells like lemon polish and his father’s aftershave.
His mother’s hands shake around a glass she never drinks from.
The news says private plane, crash and burn, no survivors.
His father, who had finally made enough money to buy the kind of freedom men brag about, had learned to fly like it was a trophy.
Callum remembers the way people said, tragic, senseless, with their sad eyes and their softer voices, like tragedy was a thing to be admired.
He remembers that after, everything got quieter. His mother got sharper. Less patient. More tired. And then she remarried, as if love was a doorway out of grief, and Callum became the thing that didn’t fit in the new life.
By fourteen, Callum is made entirely of rage.
Rage at his father for leaving. Rage at his mother for moving on. Rage at himself for still wanting anyone to choose him.
He gets into trouble, real trouble. Not childish rebellion, not scraped knees and foul language. Trouble that lands him in court. Trouble that his mother can’t stand to see in her new husband’s house.
So she sends him away.
The boys’ school is all stone and discipline and silence. It smells like damp wool, bleach, and hopelessness. The staff speaks in clipped commands. The older boys learn where to hide bruises. Callum learns to punch first. To keep his back to the wall. To sleep with one ear open.
He tells himself no one is coming.
Then one day, the headmaster calls him to the office.
A man stands there, tall, broad-shouldered, hair too long, eyes too bright. The staff treats him with a strange kind of respect and admiration, someone famous. His father’s best friend.
Keir MacLaren.
Callum recognized him instantly from the time he’d spent with his father, from posters, from television, from the way people said his name like it was a dare. A rock god. A disaster. A brilliant man who doesn’t belong to rules.
Keir looks at Callum like he is evaluating a guitar that might be worth fixing.
“So you’re the troublemaker,” Keir says.
Callum lifts his chin. “I don’t think so. What are you doing here?”
Keir smiles, sharp as a blade. “I’m getting you out of this place.”
Callum doesn’t believe him.
Not until Keir signs papers with a scrawl that looks like a signature and a warning.
Not until Keir walks him out past the locked gates, tosses his duffel bag into the boot of his car, and says, “Get in.”
No lecture. No pity. No promises he couldn’t keep.
Just action.
Structure.
Choice.
Keir had chosen him.
And now Keir is gone.
Callum’s hands ache on the steering wheel as the memory snaps back into the present.
The sky is the color of steel when he turns onto the narrow road that winds through heather and stone fences. Fog clings to the hills like breath. The land feels ancient and watchful, the kind of place that remembers everything and forgives nothing.
Then the castle appears. Home for the last ten years. A place where he’d found his passion and become a man.
Gray stone rising out of mist, stubborn and imposing, like it’s holding its ground against time itself. Ivy climbs one wall, uninvited. Windows stare out over the land like dark eyes.
Callum’s throat tightens so hard, it hurts.
This place, these walls, are home.
Not the place he was born. Not the life he lost when his father’s plane burned. Not the tidy world his mother built with another man and another set of rules.
Home is here. In the echoing halls where Keir’s laugh had bounced. In the music room where the guitars sit like sleeping animals. In the kitchen, where Keir had sworn at the kettle and made terrible tea and acted as if rules were optional but loyalty was not.
At the gate, paparazzi are gathered. A makeshift memorial stands there with flowers scattered everywhere. Left by hundreds of fans. All for the man who is now gone.
Callum’s chest aches with unshed tears for the man who’d saved him.
When the gate opens, he pulls into the drive and cuts the engine. For a moment, he can’t move. His hands are locked on the wheel again, like letting go will make it real.
He swallows hard. Forces himself out of the car.
The cold air hits his face like a slap. The scent of wet stone and peat and distant smoke fills his lungs. He stands there looking up at the castle, and grief comes in a wave so strong, it nearly drops him to his knees.
Keir is dead.
The words still don’t fit.
Callum crosses the gravel, boots crunching, and shoves the heavy front door open.
The familiar creak answers him.
Inside, the air is colder than he expects. Quiet. Too quiet.