Chapter 17
Keir’s bedroom is nothing like Isla expects.
There is no chaos here. The space feels controlled, refined, even. The bed is neatly made, the coverlet smoothed flat. The dresser top is bare except for a single lamp and a watch placed with care. Heavy curtains frame the tall windows, drawn back just enough to let in the pale Scottish light.
The room feels… held together.
Isla stands just inside the doorway, fingers curling slowly at her sides.
“This doesn’t look like someone who lived recklessly and didn’t care,” she says quietly.
Callum steps in behind her. He doesn’t say anything at first. His gaze moves slowly over the room, as if he’s taking inventory of something familiar and unsettling at the same time.
“No,” he says finally, “it doesn’t.”
They stand there together, letting the silence settle. Isla hadn’t realized how much she expected anger to live here, some echo of chaos, some proof that her mother’s version of Keir had been right all along.
Instead, this room contradicts everything.
She crosses to the dresser and opens the top drawer. Shirts folded with precision. Not fashionable. Practical. Neutral colors. Things meant to last.
“He was orderly,” Isla murmurs.
Callum nods. “He needed things to make sense. If the outside world didn’t… this did.”
Isla looks up at him. “You should have been his child.”
“We lived together for a long time.” Callum’s mouth curves faintly. “He talked. More than people think.”
She opens the next drawer, socks, belts, a watch nestled in its box.
“Did he ever mention a wife in Colorado?” she asks before she can stop herself.
Callum stills.
He doesn’t look away. That alone feels like kindness.
“No, he didn’t speak of your mom around me. He talked about regret,” he says carefully. “About mistakes that couldn’t be fixed with money or apology, but he never mentioned Alisa by name.”
Not an answer. But not avoidance either.
Isla nods once. “That sounds like him.”
They move around the room, falling into an unspoken rhythm. She checks the nightstand. Callum scans the bookshelf along the far wall. It’s filled with music, scores, theory books, and thick notebooks filled with handwritten notes.
Callum pulls one down and flips it open. His fingers linger on the pages.
“He annotated everything,” he says. “Couldn’t leave a thought unfinished.”
Isla watches him, struck by how different he seems here. Less guarded. More… present. As if this room strips something away from him too.
“What did he teach you?” she asks.
Callum hesitates. Then, quietly, “How to survive.”
That makes her look up.
“That’s not music,” she says.
“It was,” he replies. “Just not the kind people clap for.”
She waits.
Callum exhales and sets the book down. “After my father died in a small plane crash, my mother remarried. Quickly.”
Isla sits on the edge of the bed, instinctively still.
“I didn’t fit into the new picture,” Callum continues.
Her chest tightens. “What did she do?”
“She sent me to a boys’ school,” he says flatly.
Something in his tone makes her heart drop.
“Boarding school?” she asks.
He shakes his head. “Correctional. Supposed to straighten me out. Discipline. Structure.”
“How old were you?”
“Fourteen.”
Isla’s breath catches. “That’s… young.”
“Yes.”
“Was it bad?” she asks, already knowing the answer.
Callum lets out a slow breath. “It was hell.”
The word hangs between them.
“They called it character building,” he continues. “But it was mostly about breaking you down until you stopped being inconvenient.”
Isla’s fingers curl into the bedspread. “Your mother knew?”
“She told herself it was for my own good,” he says. “That I’d thank her one day.”
Her voice is tight. “Did you?”
“No.”
He looks at her now, fully. “Keir found out.”
“How?”
“I wrote him a letter,” Callum says. “Didn’t even know if he’d get it. Just needed someone to know I was there.”
Isla swallows hard.
“He showed up,” Callum says. “Unannounced. Walked into the headmaster’s office like he owned the place.”
A flicker of something, pride, disbelief, moves across his face.
“He didn’t argue. He didn’t negotiate. He told them I was leaving. That I was his responsibility now.”
Isla’s eyes sting. “Just like that?”
“Just like that.”
“And your mother?”
“She was furious,” Callum said with a smile. “Said Keir was interfering. That I needed discipline.”
“What did Keir say?”
Callum’s mouth tightens. “He said discipline without compassion was cruelty.”
Isla closes her eyes.
“He took me home,” Callum continues. “Taught me music. Gave me work. Made me feel… salvageable. Told me my father would be proud of me. That meant a lot to me.”
A silence falls, heavy and reverent.
“He stayed for you,” Isla says softly.
“Yes.”
The words change something between them.
Isla stands abruptly, needing motion, and crosses to the small desk near the window. She opens drawers one by one, paper, envelopes, things kept because they mattered.
“I’m happy for you” she says quietly.
The remark is clearly sarcastic.
“Yes,” Callum agrees.
She turns back to him, startled. “You don’t defend him.”
“I don’t need to,” he says. “Understanding isn’t absolution. We don’t know why Keir didn’t come to see you. If he rescued me, why wouldn’t he see his own daughter?”
Isla stands at the desk, fingers still curled around the drawer edge, while Callum remains near the bookcase, his posture tight as if he’s braced for the room to fight back. The story he just told sits between them, heavier than any object in Keir’s bedroom.
“Have you ever told anyone how Keir saved you?” Isla says quietly.
Callum’s gaze flicks to hers. “There wasn’t much point.”
“That’s not true.” Isla’s voice firms.
He gives a short, humorless laugh. “I’m not sure why I told you. Maybe because I wanted you to know me and why I feel so protective of Keir.”
Isla steps away from the desk, moving toward the shelves where the notebooks sit. She picks up one of Keir’s annotated scores and flips through it, pretending her hands are steady.
“Maybe because you’re tired of carrying it alone,” she says.
Callum’s jaw tightens, but he doesn’t deny it.
They drift back into the search, but it feels different now, less like an invasion and more like a joint excavation. Isla checks the nightstand again, more carefully this time, lifting the lamp and running her fingers along the underside.
Callum watches her, then mirrors the motion on the other side of the room, sliding a hand along the back panel of the bookcase.
“You’re thorough,” he murmurs.
“I’m stubborn,” Isla corrects.
“That too.”
She glances at him. “Keir taught you to be observant.”
“He taught me to assume people hide what matters,” Callum says.
That lands like a key turning in a lock. What had he hidden?
Isla moves to the wardrobe and opens it again, not looking at the clothes this time but at the structure, hinges, seams, edges. She presses against the back panel.
It doesn’t move.
Callum crosses the room and stops beside her, close enough that she feels his heat. Not touching. Just there.
“Try the bottom,” he says.
“Why?”
“Because Keir always hid things where people didn’t want to kneel,” Callum replies.
Isla snorts, then crouches, fingertips brushing the baseboard. She finds a narrow seam she missed before. A slight gap.
Her pulse jumps.
“There,” she whispers.
Callum drops to a crouch beside her. “Good eye.”
Together they press along the seam. The panel shifts, barely, but enough to reveal a shallow compartment. Isla sucks in a breath.
“Of course,” she mutters. “A hidden compartment. Because why be normal when you can be Keir MacLaren?”
Callum’s mouth twitches. “He’d consider normal an insult.”
Isla reaches inside. Her fingers brush paper. A small bundle of folded documents. She pulls them out and sets them on the floor between them.
Old correspondence, a list of names, a torn piece of hotel stationery with a number scribbled on it.
Nothing conclusive.
Everything suggestive.
Isla exhales in frustration. “It’s like chasing smoke.”
“It’s like Keir,” Callum says.
Isla looks up sharply. “That isn’t fair.”
Callum’s expression stills. “No,” he admits. “It isn’t. But it’s what he did, left evidence without explanation.”
Isla presses on because she needs the truth more than she needs comfort. “So don’t tell me he didn’t think he was allowed. He allowed himself to save you.”
A muscle jumps in Callum’s jaw. He looks away briefly, then back.
“You want the ugliest answer?” he asks quietly.
Isla’s chest tightens. “Yes.”
Callum swallows. “Because saving me didn’t risk destroying you.”
Isla goes still.
Callum continues, voice rougher now, like each word costs him. “If he showed up in your life, if he fought Alisa, fought custody, fought the narrative, he knew he’d lose. And he knew you’d be the battlefield.”
Isla’s eyes sting.
“So he stayed away,” she whispers.
Callum nods once. “Knowing him, distance was the only thing he could control.”
“That’s still cowardice,” Isla says, but it comes out smaller now. Wounded.
“Yes,” Callum agrees again. “It is.”
The honesty hits her harder than defense ever would.
Isla looks down at the papers in her lap, then back up. “And you,” she says, voice sharpening, “you still want the castle. Even knowing this.”
Callum’s breath catches. “I want… what it means.”
“That’s not an answer,” Isla says.
He lifts his gaze, and for a moment, she sees something raw there, fear, maybe, or grief he hasn’t named.
“The castle is the only place I’ve ever belonged,” Callum says quietly. “If I lose it, I don’t know who I am.”
The confession shocks her into silence.
She doesn’t soften. Not yet. But something in her shifts, an understanding that Callum’s loyalty isn’t greed.
It’s survival.
The room is silent again, but not hostile. Just full.
Callum exhales, as if he regrets saying too much, and stands. “Keep looking,” he says softly. “If we’re going to hate the truth, we might as well know it.”
Isla rises too.
And this time, when they move through the room, they do it like partners, side by side, hands occasionally brushing as they reach for the same drawer, the same book, the same corner of the past.
The desk drawer sticks, then slides open. Inside are envelopes stacked neatly. Legal. Financial. Managed.
“He kept everything,” Isla murmurs.
“He believed history mattered,” Callum replies. “Even when it hurt.”
They work in silence again, the air companionable now. At one point, Callum reaches across her to pull down a box from the top shelf. His arm brushes her shoulder, his chest close behind her for a brief second.
Neither of them moves away.
Finally, Callum freezes.
Isla looks up. “What?”
He’s holding an envelope she hadn’t noticed before. Thicker than the others. Older.
No address.
Just a date.
“This was hidden,” Callum says. “Not filed.”
Isla’s pulse quickens. “That means something.”
Callum turns it over slowly. The seal is intact.
“He didn’t want this mixed in with the rest,” he says.
He looks at her, searching her face. “Are you ready?”
Isla hesitates. Then steps closer.
“Not yet,” she says. “But I don’t want you to put it down.”
Callum nods.
He holds the envelope out, and she places her hand over his, both of them gripping the paper together.
The contact is steady. Intentional.
She looks up at him, surprised by the hope rising inside her, fragile and unwanted and impossible to ignore.
This matters. She knows it does. Whatever is sealed inside the envelope could shatter what little certainty she has left, but for the first time, she isn’t standing on the edge by herself.
They will face it together. The castle settles around them, as if holding its breath.
And Isla knows, absolutely knows—
This envelope is not the end of the story.
It’s the beginning of the truth.