Chapter Fifteen
The Letter That Changes Everything
Eva found Florence in the inn’s small office, surrounded by towers of paperwork that seemed to have multiplied overnight.
The room smelled of old paper and Florence’s lavender hand cream, mixed with the bitter scent of reheated coffee that had gone cold hours ago.
The older woman looked up as Eva knocked on the doorframe, her reading glasses sliding down her nose, a red pen still poised over columns of numbers that refused to add up to anything good.
For the first time since arriving at the Riddle & Quill, Eva saw Florence as she truly was—not the bustling innkeeper with endless energy, but an old woman carrying the weight of too many years and too many worries.
The desk lamp cast harsh shadows across Florence’s face, highlighting the deep grooves around her mouth and the purple smudges beneath her eyes.
“We need to talk about Aidan’s offer,” Eva said softly, closing the door behind her. The latch clicked with a finality that made her stomach clench.
Florence’s hands stilled on the papers, the rustling silence suddenly oppressive. Outside, a dog barked—sharp and insistent in the cold night air. “How do you know about the agreement?”
“He showed me. At the café.” Eva moved closer, her boots creaking on the old floorboards that dipped in the middle from decades of footsteps.
She noticed the slight tremor in Florence’s hands as she set down her pen.
“He seemed to get a kick out of sharing it with me. How could you sign it, Florence?”
“I signed a preliminary agreement.” Florence’s voice was steady, but her eyes were wet, catching the lamplight like winter puddles. “Nothing’s final yet. I wanted … I just needed to have options.”
“Florence—”
“I’m too old for this, Eva.” The words came out sharp, defensive. She stood abruptly, her chair scraping against the floor with a sound like fingernails on wood. “I’ve been fighting to keep this place afloat for God knows how long. I can’t fight forever.”
Eva sat down across from her, the leather chair releasing a soft wheeze of protest, its springs long past their prime.
Through the window behind Florence, she could see frost creeping across the glass, transforming the lights of York into impressionist smears of gold and white.
“What if you didn’t have to fight alone? ”
Florence laughed, but there was no humour in it.
“With what army? Charlie’s maps don’t pay the mortgage.
My regular guests are aging faster than the building.
And you …” She paused, studying Eva with those sharp blue eyes that seemed to catalogue every detail, every tell.
“You’ll go home eventually. Back to your real life. ”
“This feels like my real life,” Eva said quietly, her fingers finding the worn edge of Margaret’s diary in her bag, the leather soft as skin beneath her touch. “More real than anything I had in Nashville.”
“Feelings change. People leave.” Florence’s voice carried the weight of experience, each word dropping like stones into still water. “That’s what Margaret learned too late.”
Eva pulled out the diary, its pages whispering secrets as she set it on the desk between them. The leather cover bore the marks of countless handlings, oil from fingers that had traced its surface in joy and sorrow. “I’ve been reading Margaret’s diary. The one from the box you gave me.”
Florence’s hand moved involuntarily towards the diary, then stopped, fingers hovering inches away as if the leather might burn on touch. “You’ve read it all then?”
“Most of it. About Walter, about how he left—deployed without warning, without goodbye. She writes about it like he abandoned her, but …” Eva hesitated, watching dust motes dance in the lamplight like tiny ghosts. “There’s an unopened letter. From 1946. From him.”
Florence was silent for a long moment, her fingers worrying the edge of an invoice until the paper began to fray, leaving tiny white fragments on the dark wood.
“She could never bring herself to open it. I remember her showing it to me once, years ago. Said some questions were better left unanswered.”
“But she kept it.”
“She kept everything that mattered. Hidden away, locked up tight, but kept all the same.” Florence’s eyes went distant, focusing on something beyond the frost-etched window—perhaps seeing Margaret as she’d been, young and broken and determinedly cheerful.
“I suspected there was more to the story. The way she’d flinch at American accents, the way she’d go quiet every fourth of July.
But in those days, you didn’t talk about such things.
Maybe if we were sisters, cousins don’t exactly have the same clout and of course there was always the age difference so I missed out on some of those types of conversations. ”
“Your family never spoke about it?”
“Never, think about it Eva, it would have been a scandal at that time. Falling in love for a stranger when your hand is promised to another? No, she did the ‘right’ thing. She swallowed the pain and married Charlie’s grandfather—Thomas—in 1946 just as she said she would.
Had Charlie’s mother, Sarah. Built a life.
A good life, by all accounts. But of course, there was always something …
” Florence shook her head. “Like she was living someone else’s story. ”
Eva thought of her own life in Nashville, the careful construction of an existence that looked perfect from the outside. Her hands found each other in her lap, fingers twisting together—a nervous habit her mother had always hated. “I know that feeling.”
“I expect you do.” Florence’s gaze sharpened. “Is that why you’re really here, do you think? Running from your own Walter?”
“No,” Eva said, thinking of Charlie, of the way he’d looked at her in the Castle Howard grounds. “I think part of me has only just found my version of Walter and I’m trying my best to run towards him.”
Florence was quiet, studying her. “Charlie doesn’t know you have all this, does he? Margaret’s diary, the letters?”
“Not yet. He’s been avoiding my messages since yesterday.”
“He’s protecting her the only way he knows how,” Florence said gently.
She moved to the window, her reflection ghostlike in the dark glass as she looked down to the frosty scene below her.
“He grew up thinking his grandmother was abandoned by a careless American soldier. It shaped him, that story. Made him careful with his heart. I know you’ve met Sophie.
I’m sure you can imagine how that break up went from the little you’ve seen of her. That factors in too, of course.”
“God I know, but what if that’s not the whole truth? What if Walter had reasons—”
“What if he did?” Florence interrupted, turning back with a swish of wool cardigan. “What if that letter contains explanations, apologies, declarations of undying love? It doesn’t change what happened. Margaret lived her whole life without him. Made her choices, for better or worse.”
“It just seems so unfair,” Eva said. “All that love, wasted.”
“Was it wasted?” Florence asked. “She helped hundreds of people find their own happiness. She saved this inn, built a community, raised a family. Maybe it wasn’t the life she’d dreamed of, but it was a life. A good one, in its way.”
They sat in silence, the weight of Margaret’s choices heavy between them. Finally, Florence stood, moving to the window that overlooked the inn’s small garden.
“I don’t want to sell to Aidan,” she said quietly.
Her breath fogged the glass, obscuring the view of bare rose bushes and frost-silvered grass.
“This place is all I have left of her, of the family we built here. But wanting something and the reality of it are very different things. Unless a miracle happens by 24th of December …”
Eva stood too, determination crystallising in her chest. “Then we make a miracle happen. We have two days—”
“Eva.” Florence’s voice was gentle but firm. “This isn’t a fairy tale. This is real life, with real consequences. Sometimes the dragon wins. Sometimes the castle falls.”
“And sometimes,” Eva said, thinking of Margaret’s courage in the face of impossible circumstances, “sometimes ordinary people do extraordinary things. Not because it’s easy, but because it matters.”
Florence studied her for a long moment, then smiled—a real smile this time, one she hadn’t seen from the innkeeper since she first arrived. “You’re very like her, you know. Margaret. That same stubborn hope.”
“Is that a good thing?”
“Ask me in two days,” Florence said. “Now go find Charlie. He needs to know about all this. About the diary, the letter, everything. And Eva?” She paused. “Be gentle with him. Some wounds we inherit from the people who loved us.”
Eva climbed the stairs to her room, each step creaking a different note—the inn’s wooden symphony that she’d grown to love.
Her head was spinning with everything she’d learned.
She needed to think, to figure out what came next.
The room felt different now—not a temporary refuge but something more.
She moved to the wardrobe, intending to organise her thoughts along with her clothes, a coping mechanism that was tried and tested whenever she could feel some sort of meltdown happening.
Pulling hangers out at random, she was interrupted by heavy footsteps on the stairs.
The footsteps were uneven, angry—taking the stairs two at a time, then a surprise pause, like a deep breath before continuing. She knew it was Charlie before he arrived, could feel his approach like electricity before a storm.
Charlie appeared in her doorway, his face a tempest of emotions.
His hair was wild, as if he’d been running his hands through it, and his coat still bore traces of the December cold—tiny crystals of frost melting into dark patches on the wool.
“Florence told me you have Margaret’s diary. That you’ve been reading it.”