Chapter Six - Holt
The truck ride to the inn goes quieter than the one last night. I swapped the volunteer truck out for my own at the station before we made any headway toward the inn. Lark didn’t complain at all.
Morning changes things. Light gets in the way of whatever mystery darkness lends a moment.
The town is awake now, people moving through it with coffee cups and errands and the false confidence that comes from a day beginning before anything has had the chance to go wrong.
We pass the bakery with its OPEN sign lit in the front window, the marina already carrying the glint of sun off the water, a couple of men unloading coolers from the back of a pickup near the bait shop.
Lark watches it all through the passenger window.
Not idly.
She takes things in the way I’ve started to notice she does everything—with focus that looks almost calm until you spend another second looking at it and realize it’s something else entirely.
Measurement. Assessment. A constant, low-grade need to understand her surroundings before they can surprise her.
I know that kind of attention. I wear my own version of it to work every shift. The difference is that mine gets a name people respect. Training. Awareness. Preparedness. A woman carries the same thing on her shoulders, and suddenly, people call her difficult.
I grip the wheel a little tighter and turn into the drive for Carrington House.
The place looks worse in daylight. That’s saying something, because it looked rough enough in the middle of a fire.
Morning strips away the mercy of darkness.
The front of the house stands broad and weathered in the early sun, every crack in the paint and sag in the porch rail thrown into sharper relief.
The broken window on the first floor glares like a missing tooth.
The side yard still looks wet where we worked the fire line, patches of blackened grass cutting ugly swaths through the green.
And behind it all, the carriage house sits exactly where I left it. Burned down to a truth nobody can argue with.
Lark goes still the second I put the truck in park. Her hand tightens once around the strap of her bag, then she reaches for the door.
I get there first.
“Hold up.”
She turns her head toward me, irritation already taking shape. “What?”
“I’m getting out first.”
Her expression goes flat. “You know that’s annoying, right?”
“Yeah.”
“And you’re doing it anyway.”
“Yeah.”
That almost gets me another one of those almost smiles. Almost.
I step out, circle the front of the truck, and scan the property before I open her door.
No movement in the windows. No one on the road slowing down to stare. No sign of anyone returning in the night. Still, something under my skin stays tight.
Lark climbs out without waiting for help, Rook hopping down after her with a grunt that sounds personally offended by the ground.
She looks toward the carriage house and doesn’t say anything at first. That worries me more than if she had.
I shut the passenger door and stand beside her in the gravel. Morning air carries the damp scent of wet ash and salt, but there’s something else in it too now—the exposed, stripped-back smell of burned wood cooling in daylight. It gets into the back of your throat. Stays there.
“They’ll want to see it before you move anything,” I say quietly.
She nods.
“I know.”
But she doesn’t sound like she hears me. She sounds like she’s somewhere else entirely.
I follow her gaze to the wrecked frame of the carriage house. What’s left of the roofline has caved inward. One side wall still stands mostly upright, blackened and skeletal. The lean-to on the back corner is half collapsed, its contents obscured by charred debris and steam-darkened wood.
“You planned to stay there,” I say.
She glances at me then, not surprised I figured it out.
“That was the idea.”
“It would’ve needed work.”
“It still has bones,” she says, the words coming quickly this time, defensive in a way that tells me I hit something raw. “Or it did.”
I look back toward the structure.
“Yeah.”
Lark exhales slowly. “My dad loved the carriage house.”
That gets my full attention.
Her eyes stay on the building, her face angled just enough that I catch the shift in it when she says his name. It isn’t softness exactly. It’s deeper than that. Grief worn smooth at the edges from repetition but no less heavy for it.
“He talked about converting it into a private cottage,” she says. “One stand-alone room for couples or long stays. Private porch. Garden path. Original beams exposed if we could save them.”
She says we like the plan still lives in the present tense. Maybe for her, it does.
I look at the building again and try to imagine it the way she’s describing it. Not wrecked. Not open to the sky. Whole. Intentional. Wanted. It isn’t hard. And that bothers me more than it should.
“Come on,” I say.
Her gaze shifts. “Where?”
“Front porch. We’ll wait there until the marshal gets here.”
“We?”
I hear the challenge in the single word and decide not to take the bait.
“You think I drove out here to leave you standing in the yard by yourself?”
“That would’ve been nice.”
“No, it wouldn’t have.”
She gives me a look and heads toward the porch anyway.
Rook trots ahead, his bent tail moving in an uncertain half-sway as he tests the boards one paw at a time. I follow a step behind her, close enough to catch her if she hits a weak spot, far enough that it doesn’t feel like crowding.
The porch holds.
Barely.
There’s damage here too—soft boards near the far railing, one section dipped lower than the rest, old stains darkening the wood around the base of the columns. I clock it all in the same sweep.
Lark unlocks the front door and pushes it open.
The smell inside is different in daylight too. Not better. Just clearer. Mildew. Old rot. Cleaners she was already using. Smoke from the fire rides in over everything else.
She steps into the foyer and stops and I do the same right behind her.
Sunlight cuts through the dirty front windows, turning dust visible in the air.
It catches on the worn banister of the staircase, the torn wallpaper, the contractor bag near the wall she must have filled yesterday.
The place looks like it’s halfway between ruin and resurrection, too broken to ignore but not beyond saving.
It makes sense, suddenly, that her father wanted it. It also makes sense why she’d fight for it with a garden hose and bad judgment.
Lark looks over her shoulder at me. “I know what you’re thinking.”
“I doubt that.”
“You think it’s too much.”
I glance past her into the parlor, where old water stains bloom on the ceiling like maps of some country nobody would choose to visit.
“I think it needs work.”
“That’s diplomatic.”
“It’s accurate.”
She turns fully now, one hand still on the edge of the door. “Most people walk into places like this and only see what’s wrong.”
I lean one shoulder against the frame and look around again, this time slower.
The staircase is still beautiful under the grime. The trim in the foyer has been hacked at in places but not destroyed. The ceiling medallion in what used to be the parlor still shows beneath layers of dust and smoke.
“No,” I say finally. “Most people walk into places like this and only see what they’d rather replace than fix.”
That stills her. Good, because I mean it.
Rook darts ahead, then doubles back immediately, unwilling to lose sight of either of us for long. He’s still jumpy, still carrying last night in his body even if he isn’t showing it as sharply.
Lark moves room to room with a notebook she grabbed off the staircase in one hand, checking things, writing something down, pausing now and then to run her fingers over damaged trim or window hardware like she’s reassuring herself the bones are still here under all the mess.
I stay a step behind and watch. Not because I think she can’t manage herself. Because it’s impossible not to.
Everything in her changes when she looks at the house this way. The edges sharpen. The exhaustion from last night doesn’t disappear, but something stronger rises above it. Focus. Ownership. The kind of competence that doesn’t need announcing.
She stops in the dining room and crouches beside a section of wall where the paint has bubbled from moisture.
“This was already an issue,” she says, more to herself than to me. “The fire just made it easier to see.”
I brace one hand on the doorframe. “You talk to buildings often.”
She glances up. “Only the stubborn ones.”
My mouth shifts before I can stop it. “So you’ve got plenty in common.”
She stands in one smooth movement, turning toward me with that look she gets right before she says something sharp.
“You really like telling me what I’m doing wrong.”
“I really like pointing out when you’re obviously ignoring common sense.”
“Those aren’t the same thing.”
“Pretty close, from where I’m standing.”
Her eyes narrow just slightly. There’s heat in it. Not anger. Something quicker. Something more dangerous.
For one second, the room feels smaller than it should, the air between us tighter, more aware.
Then Rook barks at a dust-covered corner table like it insulted his mother and the moment breaks.
Lark looks down. “That’s antique furniture.”
He barks again.
“It’s also terrifying,” I say.
Her laugh catches me off guard. It comes quick and low and completely real, cutting through the smell of smoke and old wood like something alive.
I feel it in my chest.
The knock on the front door saves me from having to respond.
Marshal and Inspector. Two people in county polos and hard expressions, carrying clipboards and the kind of caution that says they’ve walked too many scenes to offer easy reassurance.
The next hour belongs to them.