Chapter 11 #2
“This doesn’t change why I’m here,” she says, more to herself than to Callum. “I still need answers.”
Callum doesn’t argue. That, more than anything, unsettles her.
“Then keep looking,” he says instead.
She opens the next drawer, the one above the photograph. Inside are folders, thicker, messier, less assembled. Receipts. Airline itineraries. Handwritten notes shoved between documents without order or apology.
“This is chaos,” Isla mutters.
“He kept business clean,” Callum says. “Personal things… not so much.”
She flips through the papers quickly at first, scanning dates, locations. New York. London. Berlin. Paris. Always moving. Always somewhere else.
Her chest tightens.
“There are gaps,” she says.
Callum leans over the desk, pointing, not touching. “Here. And here. He disappears for weeks at a time.”
“Recording?”
“Sometimes.”
“And the rest?”
Callum exhales slowly. “That’s where the story never quite added up.”
Isla stops flipping pages.
“What story?”
“The one he told everyone,” Callum says. “That he was incapable of staying in one place. That he’d ruin anything he touched if he stayed too long.”
Her hands still.
“That’s convenient,” she says bitterly. “Self-awareness as an excuse.”
“That’s what I used to think,” Callum admits. “Now I’m not sure.”
Isla looks up sharply. “What changed?”
Callum hesitates, then gestures vaguely between them. “This.”
She scoffs. “You heard me play a sad song, and suddenly my father becomes complicated?”
“No,” he says quietly. “You’re complicated. He always was. I just never had reason to connect the two.”
Isla doesn’t know what to do with that. Could she be like her father in some ways?
They work in silence for a while. The kind that isn’t awkward but isn’t comfortable either, charged, alert. Callum reads dates aloud when something catches his attention. Isla matches them against memory, against her mother’s carefully tailored timeline.
“He was in Denver when I was ten,” Isla says slowly, staring at a receipt. “My mother said he was overseas that entire year.”
Callum’s jaw tightens. “Denver’s a day’s drive from where you lived then.”
“A short flight,” Isla adds.
They exchange a look.
Not triumph. Not vindication.
Something heavier.
She shoves the folder aside. “I don’t like this.”
Callum gives a humorless smile. “Neither did he, whenever facts got involved.”
Isla pushes back from the desk, suddenly restless. She paces the room, arms folded tightly across her chest.
“I’ve spent my entire life believing one story,” she says. “It’s shaped everything, how I work, how I plan, how I leave before people can leave me.”
Callum watches her carefully. “And now?”
“Now the story has cracks,” she snaps. “And I don’t know what’s underneath.”
He nods. “That’s usually the worst part.”
She stops pacing near the window, staring out at the way the trees reached for the sky. “Why are you helping me?”
Callum doesn’t answer right away.
“When I was younger,” he says finally, “I believed loyalty meant protecting someone’s reputation at all costs.”
“And now?”
“Now I think loyalty might mean telling the truth, even when it ruins the myth.”
Isla turns back to him. “That could cost you the castle.”
A flicker of something dark crosses his expression. “It already has.”
The admission lands harder than she expects.
She moves back to the desk, slower this time, more careful. The photograph waits in the drawer like a quiet accusation. She doesn’t take it out again.
Instead, she opens the leather notebook.
Keir’s handwriting fills the pages, slanted, impatient, restless. Musical notations bleed into half-sentences. Ideas abandoned mid-thought.
And then—
Her name.
Isla freezes.
It isn’t a dedication. It isn’t poetic. Just a line in the margin:
Isla, piano here, not guitar.
Her throat closes.
Callum sees the change in her immediately. “What is it?”
She turns the notebook so he can see.
He goes still.
“He never wrote names down,” Callum says quietly. “He said it made things too real.”
Her fingers trace the word. “Then why write mine?”
Callum doesn’t answer.
He can’t.
The silence stretches, heavy and intimate. Callum steps closer without seeming to realize he’s doing it, his presence warm and steady at her back. Not touching, but close enough that she feels anchored.
She hates how much she wants to lean into it.
Hates that her body reacts before her heart can harden.
“I can’t do this,” she says suddenly, snapping the notebook shut. “I can’t rewrite my entire childhood based on scraps of paper and your memories.”
Callum steps back at once. “Then don’t.”
She blinks. “What?”
“Don’t decide anything today,” he says. “Just… keep the evidence.”
She studies him. “You’re remarkably reasonable for someone who might lose everything.”
A corner of his mouth lifts. “I’ve already lost worse.”
She doesn’t ask what.
The room settles again, quieter now, but not empty. Isla gathers the notebook and the photograph, stacking them neatly.
“I’m keeping these,” she says.
Callum nods. “You should.”
She hesitates, then adds, “This doesn’t mean I trust you.”
“I wouldn’t expect you to.”
“And it doesn’t mean this—” she gestures vaguely between them, “—is anything.”
“Of course not.”
The agreement feels fragile.
Isla moves toward the door, then stops. “You know this makes things harder.”
Callum meets her gaze. “The truth usually does.”
She leaves the office with the weight of paper in her hands and something far heavier pressing against her ribs.
She tells herself Callum is temporary.
She tells herself the castle is just stone and history and obligation.
But as she walks away, she can still feel the warmth of him at her back, and that, more than anything Keir left behind, terrifies her.