Chapter 10 #2
“Song ideas,” she says. “Fragments. Him counting beats, humming melodies, muttering lines. Nothing personal. No confession. No apology. No mention of me.”
She tries for a shrug and fails. “It shouldn’t have disappointed me. It’s exactly what I should have expected.”
“But you hoped,” Callum says quietly.
Her eyes flash. “I’m not stupid, but yes…I got my hopes up I’d found a message he left me.”
“Hoping doesn’t make you stupid.”
“Don’t,” she snaps, the word sharp with panic. “Don’t be kind.”
Callum lets the silence stretch. Kindness is its own kind of danger.
Isla’s chin lifts again, defensive. “It was just music,” she says, as if repeating it will make it hurt less. “That’s all he ever left behind.”
Callum’s gaze slides to the piano. “Music is never just music.”
“That’s easy for you to say,” she fires back. “You got him.”
Callum flinches at the accuracy.
“I got parts of him,” he says slowly. “And it wasn’t always the good parts.”
There were nights, he remembered, taking care of a drunk Keir. A man haunted by ghosts of the past. And now Callum was beginning to understand why.
Isla stills, startled by the admission.
“He could be generous,” Callum continues, voice low. “And he could be selfish. Brilliant and cruel in the same hour. He could make you feel chosen and then punish you for believing it.”
Isla’s throat works. “So why didn’t he choose me?”
The question isn’t sharp.
It’s worse.
It’s honest.
Callum has no answer.
He thinks of Keir dragging him out of a future that would have destroyed him. And he thinks of Isla as a child, waiting.
The contradiction doesn’t resolve. It only sharpens.
“I don’t know,” Callum admits. “It makes no sense to me.”
The words feel like betrayal and relief.
“But I’m starting to wonder,” he adds, “if the man I knew and the man who left you were the same person at all.”
Isla stares at him like she can’t decide whether she wants to tear the thought apart or cling to it.
“That doesn’t make it better,” she says.
“No,” he agrees. “It makes it complicated.”
“Everything about him is,” she whispers.
Callum nods. “Keir never did simple.”
Isla turns away, palm flattening on the piano as if she needs something solid. “My mother says he didn’t want to see me.”
Callum’s jaw tightens. “Did she say why?”
“She said he chose the music,” Isla replies. “That he chose drugs and women and fame. That I was collateral damage.”
Callum’s mind flashes to Keir sober at three in the morning, staring at nothing like it was a verdict. To the rare nights he wouldn’t touch whiskey at all, fingers white around the glass as if refusing himself something.
Callum had assumed it was discipline.
Now he wonders if it was fear.
“What did he say about me?” Isla asks suddenly.
Callum meets her gaze. “He didn’t talk about you at all. I learned about you the day he died.”
Pain flickers across her face, quick as lightning.
Silence again, thick and breathing.
Callum takes a slow step forward, stopping on the other side of the piano. “I keep asking myself,” he says quietly, “how a man can save one kid and abandon another.”
Isla’s head turns sharply.
Callum holds her gaze. “It doesn’t fit.”
Her voice comes out thin. “Maybe he recognized that you were in danger and needed rescuing.”
Callum nods once. “From a place that would’ve ruined me.”
Jealousy flashes in her eyes, raw, naked, and then regret hits her instantly.
She inhales sharply. “I’m—” She stops, jaw tight. “I’m sorry.”
Callum shakes his head. “Don’t apologize for wanting what you should’ve had.”
Isla flinches like that’s worse than an insult. “Stop.”
Callum falls silent.
Isla’s hand curls on the piano’s edge. “I don’t want to be seen like this,” she says, voice shaking despite her control. “I don’t want you to understand me.”
“Why?” Callum asks.
“Because then you’ll pity me,” she snaps, heat flaring again. “And I refuse to be pitied in my own father’s house.”
Callum’s jaw tightens. “I don’t pity you. I just don’t understand why Keir did this.”
“Everyone looks at me with pity in their eyes. The servants, the press, even you,” she shoots back, then closes her eyes, as if the words are a betrayal. She exhales. “God. I’m sorry. I’m just… tired of being the only one who didn’t get him.”
Callum’s chest aches.
Isla opens her eyes again, gaze fierce and guarded. “I listened to the tape because I needed something real,” she says. “And all I got was melody.”
Callum nods. “That’s real.”
“It’s not enough,” she whispers.
“No,” Callum agrees.
Callum’s gaze catches on the fallboard above the keys.
For a moment, he sees a different scene: Keir in this room, palm on that same polished wood, staring at a photograph he kept hidden like a sin.
Callum had found it once by accident, a little girl, missing front teeth, grin bright enough to hurt.
Keir had snatched it back with a sharpness that felt like fear.
Until this past week, Callum had never known who that child was. Now he realized it was Isla.
Callum almost tells her.
The words rise to his tongue, He had a photo. He kept of you. Not in the ways that mattered, but—
He swallows them down.
A photo is not a father. A secret keepsake isn’t proof of love. It’s proof of something, yes, but Callum doesn’t know what, and he won’t feed her another half-truth.
Instead, he says, “If there’s anything you want to search for, papers, recordings, letters, I can at least tell you where he kept things.”
“You’re offering to show me where he kept his secrets?” Isla’s laugh is thin. “And I’m supposed to trust that you won’t hide the parts you don’t want me to see?”
Callum’s jaw tightens. “We’ll discover them together.”
Another silence.
Isla drops back onto the bench, not to play, but to sit in the aftermath. Her shoulders rise and fall. “What now?” she asks, voice steadier.
Callum answers honestly. “Now, I don’t know.”
Isla’s laugh is brittle. “Welcome to my life.”
Callum watches her fingers hover above the keys. He realizes he’s holding his breath again, waiting for the next thing she’ll reveal without meaning to.
Instead, she plays one chord, soft, unresolved.
It isn’t a performance. It’s punctuation.
Callum backs toward the door, slowly. The room feels too tight for both of them.
“I’ll give you space,” he says.
Isla doesn’t look at him. “Thank you,” she murmurs, and the words sound like they cost her.
Callum pauses with his hand on the door.
He wants to promise answers. He wants to promise justice. He wants to promise that the castle won’t swallow her whole.
Instead, he says, the only honest thing left.
“I don’t believe he didn’t want you,” Callum says quietly.
Isla’s head jerks up.
Callum meets her gaze, steady. “I don’t know why he stayed away. But I don’t believe it was because you weren’t worth coming back for.”
For one second, Isla looks like she might break.
Then she lifts her chin, the mask snapping back into place.
“Don’t,” she says, voice low. “Don’t give me hope you can’t back up.”
Callum nods once.
And he leaves the room.
He walks down the corridor with her music clinging to him like smoke, and one thought follows him, relentless and unsettling:
How does a man live with saving one child and walking away from another?
That’s not the Keir Callum he knew.
So either Callum never knew him at all—
Or Keir’s reason is buried somewhere in this castle, waiting to be found.
And suddenly, he wants to help her find those answers.