Chapter 26
The castle is too quiet.
Not the normal quiet of early morning, of stone and weather and distance, but the kind that follows a slammed door. The kind that means something has been said that can’t be taken back.
Once again, Callum stands in Isla’s bedroom with her letter in his hand and the legal papers spread across the bed like a verdict. He has read her words so many times, the ink feels carved into his palm.
If I stayed, I would disappear.
He keeps coming back to that line, not because it hurts the most, though it does, but because it explains everything. It explains why she left without a confrontation, why she didn’t give him another chance to hesitate.
Because she learned the hard way that hesitation is its own kind of answer.
He sits on the edge of the bed and thinks about the night they spent together. They only slept together one night, one perfect, impossible night, and still the room feels altered, as if the air remembers and is offended by the return to emptiness.
He should be angry.
He tries to be.
But anger requires a villain, and Callum can’t make Isla one. Not when he can trace every step of her decision back to a single moment: the look on her face when she asked him to choose her without flinching.
And he didn’t.
It wasn’t even a refusal. That would have been cleaner. Easier to forgive.
It was a pause.
A heartbeat of uncertainty.
A single breath where the castle won. When the stones he’d desired overcame his need to choose the woman he loved.
Callum presses the letter to his chest and closes his eyes.
He can still hear her voice from the music room, steady, defiant, quietly breaking.
I won’t stay somewhere that teaches me to disappear. Someone who doesn’t choose me.
Stone taught her that men vanish. That love is conditional. That control can wear the mask of protection.
And Callum, God help him, had stood there with a lifetime of loyalty to this place lodged in his ribs and had expected her to understand.
He picks up the legal papers, scans the crisp signatures, the formal language. The words are cold, efficient, final. They feel like a transfer of property and a transfer of guilt.
This is what she left him.
A castle.
An inheritance.
A choice he didn’t make.
He sets the papers down, hands shaking slightly.
He needs to breathe, but the air in this room tastes like old regrets. He stands and walks to the window. The grounds spread out below, damp and gray, the road leading away already scrubbed clean by distance. There are no tire tracks left. No visible proof she was ever here.
Only the absence.
Callum grips the windowsill. His knuckles whiten.
He has spent most of his life believing that staying was strength.
Stay when it’s hard. Stay when people leave. Stay when you’re unwanted. Stay because leaving means you’re weak. Leaving means you’re like everyone else who walked away.
Keir stayed away.
And called it love.
Isla left.
And called it survival.
Callum stayed.
And called it home.
The pattern is so obvious, it makes him feel sick.
He’s been furious at Keir before, furious that a man who could write songs that cracked people open could still make choices that ruined lives. Furious that he could be brilliant and selfish in the same breath. Furious that he could care and still fail.
Now Callum understands something he didn’t want to.
It’s possible to love someone and still choose wrong.
It’s possible to believe you’re protecting someone when you’re really protecting yourself.
The door behind him creaks.
Callum turns, expecting no one, and finds Mrs. Grant, the housekeeper, standing at the threshold. Her gray hair is pinned tight, her expression polite but knowing. In this castle, nothing happens unnoticed for long.
“I knocked,” she says, as if that excuses the intrusion.
Callum drags a hand through his hair. “Sorry. I didn’t hear.”
Her gaze flicks to the bed, to the letter, to the papers. She doesn’t comment. But her eyes soften.
“She’s gone, then,” Mrs. Grant says quietly.
Callum swallows. “Yes.”
Mrs. Grant nods once, as if confirming what the castle already told her. “I thought she might.”
The bluntness stings. “You thought she’d leave?”
“I thought she’d do what she had to,” Mrs. Grant replies. Then, almost gently: “She’s got that look about her. The look of a woman who’s been told no too many times.”
Callum’s chest tightens. “I didn’t tell her no.”
Mrs. Grant’s eyes sharpen. “No. You just didn’t tell her yes.”
The words land hard and clean.
Callum doesn’t argue because he can’t.
Mrs. Grant steps fully into the room. “What will you do?”
He looks at the papers again, then back at her. His voice is raw. “I don’t know.”
She studies him. “That’s a lie.”
Callum flinches.
“Men always say they don’t know,” she continues, matter-of-fact. “What they mean is they know, but they’re afraid of the cost.”
Callum’s throat works. He hates how easily she sees through him. Maybe everyone sees through him, and he’s the last to admit it.
He looks at the castle around him, Keir’s room, Keir’s handwriting, Keir’s shadow in every corner.
The castle has saved him, yes.
It has also trapped him.
Keir used to say the castle was a sanctuary. Callum is beginning to suspect it’s also a cage, beautiful, gilded, comfortable enough that you forget there’s a door.
Mrs. Grant waits, not impatient, just certain.
Callum sets Isla’s letter down carefully on the bed as if it’s something fragile. He smooths it once, his hand lingering on the paper, on her name, on the final line.
I love you.
He takes a breath.
“I’m going after her,” he says.
The words feel like stepping off a cliff. Terror and relief in the same heartbeat.
Mrs. Grant nods, unsurprised. “Good.”
Callum blinks. “Good?”
She gives him a look that could slice stone. “Did you think I’d tell you to sit in this room and mourn while she disappears into her life again?”
His mouth tightens. “She left because she didn’t want to disappear.”
“Aye,” Mrs. Grant says. “And now you’ll go and prove she doesn’t have to.”
Callum’s chest aches. “She left me the castle.”
Mrs. Grant waves that away with a small flick of her hand. “She left you a test, more like.”
Callum stares at her.
“She wants to know what you’ll choose,” Mrs. Grant says, as if explaining something obvious. “She wants to know whether you’ll hold on to stone or go after flesh and blood.”
Callum’s stomach twists.
Because that’s exactly it.
The castle has always been his excuse.
His constant.
His reason to stay put.
If he leaves, he risks everything: legal mess, headlines, responsibility, the gnawing fear that if he steps away, the only home he’s ever had will stop being his.
If he stays… he will become exactly what Isla fears.
Another man who explains absence.
Another man who chooses safety and calls it love.
Callum turns away from the bed and walks down the hall to his bedroom. Mrs. Grant follows. He opens his wardrobe and begins to pull clothes out: shirts, jeans, a coat. He packs quickly, not neatly. Function over ritual. His hands move with a strange urgency, as if speed can make up for yesterday.
Mrs. Grant watches him for a moment. “Where will you go?”
“New York,” he says, the word foreign in his mouth. “She said she was going there.”
Mrs. Grant nods. “And how will you find her in a city that size?”
Callum pauses. The practical question cuts through emotion like cold water.
He exhales and forces his mind to work. Isla’s world is schedules, venues, and hotels. She would go to a hotel, not her mother’s. She had told him she had concert commitments. And she’d mentioned Long Island, but she said she wasn’t going home.
Callum reaches for his phone with fingers that don’t quite cooperate.
He scrolls until he finds the number Isla’s assistant had called him with to coordinate something with him, before the assistant was replaced by her mother’s voice in every decision.
He hesitates. Pride tries to rise.
He crushes it.
This is not the time for pride.
He calls.
It rings.
Once. Twice.
A woman answers, brisk. “This is Kendra.”
“This is Callum Fraser,” he says. His voice is rough, and he doesn’t soften it. “I need to know where Isla is.”
A pause. Wariness. “Mr. Fraser—”
“Please,” Callum says, and the word surprises him with its nakedness. “Tell me where she is.”
Silence stretches.
Then Kendra exhales. “She checked into the Larkwell in Manhattan. Under her name. No press. No entourage. Just her. She’s fired everyone but me.”
Shocked, Callum closes his eyes in relief so sharp, it hurts. She’s cleaning house, getting rid of the parts that hurt. Taking control. “Thank you.”
“Is she okay?” Kendra asks quietly, the briskness gone.
Callum swallows. “She’s… trying to be.”
Another pause. “Do you want me to tell her you’re coming?”
“No,” Callum says immediately.
Because this can’t be managed into safety. It can’t be coordinated, smoothed, made convenient.
He needs to show up.
He ends the call and turns back to packing, faster now.
Mrs. Grant steps forward. “What about the castle?”
Callum stares at her. “That’s the problem, isn’t it?”
“No,” she says. “That’s the excuse.”
He closes his eyes, jaw clenched.
He grabs the legal papers from Isla’s bed and shoves them into a folder. He can’t leave them scattered. He can’t pretend they don’t exist. But he can’t let them be the anchor that keeps him here.
When he passes Keir’s office, he walks to the desk, opens a drawer, and pulls out one of Keir’s old guitar picks, little scraps of plastic Keir never threw away, like he believed even the smallest tool mattered if it made music.
Callum holds one in his palm, a ridiculous talisman.
Keir had lived by desire and recklessness.
Callum will do better.
He will live by choice.
He slings his bag over his shoulder, then stops and looks around the room one last time. Keir’s room. Keir’s castle. Keir’s ghost, always there, always watching.
“I’m not repeating you,” Callum says quietly, not sure who he’s talking to. Keir. Himself. The castle.
Mrs. Grant’s gaze softens. “Good.”
Callum walks out of the office and down the corridor without looking back. Each step feels like tearing something loose from inside his ribs, but the pain is clean, purposeful.
At the front door, he pauses.
The castle seems to sigh, deep and old, as if it recognizes what’s happening.
For years, it has held him.
Now it tries to keep him.
Callum rests his hand against the cold stone beside the doorframe.
“Thank you,” he murmurs, surprising himself.
Then, because he finally understands what Isla understood before he did, he adds, “But you’re not enough.”
He pulls the door open and steps into the morning.
The air bites. The world feels too wide.
And for the first time in his life, that doesn’t feel like danger.
It feels like possibility.
Callum walks to the car waiting in the drive. Mrs. Grant already arranged it, of course, because this castle has always been full of people who do the right thing quietly.
He slides into the back seat and gives the driver the address of the nearest airport.
As the car pulls away, he doesn’t look back at the castle.
Not because he doesn’t love it.
Because he finally knows what love is supposed to do.
It’s supposed to move.
It’s supposed to show up.
And this time, Callum will.