Chapter 9 #2
“Well, a warning text would’ve sufficed,” she managed.
Grant didn’t step back. His gaze shifted from her face, taking in the rest of the room—the stacked canvases, the charcoal sketches, the decades of undisturbed dust now stirred up around them.
“Been looking for you,” he said, his voice dropping. “You’ve been gone a while, and it’s getting late.” He looked down at the canvas that had skidded across the floor, then back at her windblown hair and wide eyes. His brow furrowed. “You look like you saw a ghost out there.”
Izzy crossed her arms, trying to stop the tremor in her fingers. “I was trying to find the perspective layout. And then… I don’t know. The woods went dead quiet.” She looked toward the open window, her throat tight. “It felt like Evan. It felt exactly like being watched.”
Grant’s expression calcified, his jaw tightening into a protective line. He stepped back into her space, solid and immovable.
“Did you see someone?”
“No,” she said quietly. “Just a sound. But I know that feeling, Grant. I know it down in my bones.”
Grant held her gaze, his eyes measuring her.
“Alright,” he said softly. “Never been in here. Sam told me the roof started to go years back. It’s tucked so far up the ridge I never had a reason to mess with it, so I left it alone. But if something’s moving around up here, you’re not tracking it down by yourself.”
He stepped farther inside, measured, his eyes landing on the paintings.
From the corner of his vision, he caught her again—how she’d gone still in front of the canvas of his land, how she leaned in without touching, reverent and focused.
The way she looked at the work made it easy to see why she did this for a living.
“That your place?” she asked quietly, nodding toward the wider, softer canvas.
He moved closer. Looked.
“Yeah,” he said after a second. “That’s mine. Before I bought it from Sam Talley. Before the barns. Before any of it.”
Izzy’s eyes moved over it again. “Oh,” she said softly. “Yeah… I see it now. Wow. She was good.”
“Was?”
Izzy gestured lightly around them. “She didn’t take this with her.”
Grant said nothing.
She picked up a sketchbook from the table. Careful, she flipped it open. Charcoal. Quick lines. Figures. Landscapes. Studies of light and shadow. And then—a man. Standing near a fence. Turned slightly away. Unaware he was being drawn.
Izzy paused. Something about it felt… personal. She closed the book halfway.
“Clara Vale,” she said. “That name mean anything to you?”
Grant shook his head. “No.”
She looked at him, then back at the room. “I know this work,” she said quietly. “Or something very close to it.”
His gaze shifted to her. “What do you mean?”
“I mean…” she hesitated, searching, “I’ve seen this before. Not this name. But this style. This—“ she gestured toward the canvas ”—this eye.”
Izzy held the sketchbook in both hands, then looked at him. “Would you mind if I took some of these back to the house?”
He didn’t answer right away. He glanced around the cabin again, then back at her.
“No. Have at it.”
“Thank you.”
“Alright,” he said. “Just be careful. Floor’s not solid in places.”
She smiled faintly. “Noted.”
Izzy glanced once more at the canvas of his farm—the before version—and at the mountain ridge repeated on every wall. “You should have some of these in your barn office,” she said. “Just for the history.”
Grant’s gaze stayed on the painting a second longer. “That’s not a bad idea.”
Outside, the light had dropped lower. The mountains behind the cabin darkened at the edges. Grant stepped back toward the door.
“Let’s get you out of here before it gets dark.”
Izzy took one last look around. At the paintings. The sketches. The life paused in place. A woman’s hand on every inch of it.
“What a mystery,” she murmured.
Then followed him out.
* * *
Bridlepath Farm — That Night
The house was still, the only sound the rhythmic ticking of the clock in the hallway. Izzy sat at the kitchen island, the sketchbook spread open under the warm glow of the pendant light.
The creak of floorboards made her look up.
Grant stood in the doorway of his office, his shirt untucked, looking exhausted. He watched her for a moment before walking over, leaning his weight against the counter.
“Still at it?”
“I can’t stop looking at them,” Izzy admitted. She turned the book toward him, pointing to a quick charcoal study of a man leaning against a heavy black truck. “Do any of these people look familiar to you? You’ve lived here your whole life.”
Grant squinted at the lines. He went still. He reached out, his rough finger hovering just above the paper.
“That looks just like Cal,” Izzy murmured, studying the strong jawline.
“It can’t be,” Grant said, his eyes narrowing as he looked at the date at the bottom of the page. “This was August of ninety-nine. Cal and I were only five years old back then.” His voice dropped. “That’s not Cal. That’s Wade. That’s Wade Hollis, twenty-seven years ago.”
A chill settled in the room. Izzy looked from the sketch to Grant.
“The man who owns half the valley?”
“The same,” Grant said. He flipped the page, stopping at a sketch of a distinctive wrought-iron gate. “And that’s the entrance to the Hollis estate before the renovation.”
Izzy pulled her laptop closer. “Grant, look. I’ve been comparing the brushwork in the cabin to an artist named Julian Thorne.
He’s a legend in the landscape world. The style is…
it’s hauntingly similar. The way the light is handled, the restraint.
It’s not an exact match—Thorne is more polished, more commercial—but this feels like the raw version of his soul. ”
She looked up at him, her eyes bright with a mix of professional curiosity and genuine unease. “If Clara Vale was out here painting like this in ninety-nine, and then just… stopped… what happened to her?”
Grant didn’t answer right away.
He was still watching her.
Not the sketchbook.
Her.
The way her eyes lit up when she talked about art, the way she leaned into the mystery without even realizing she was doing it. For once, she didn’t feel like a sharp Denver polish; she just felt like herself, stripped down to curiosity and candlelight and exhaustion.
Izzy’s voice trailed off, the sudden quiet filling the room.
“What?” she asked softly.
Grant shook his head once, almost like he was irritated with himself for thinking it.
“You’re pretty when you do that.”
The words landed between them before either of them could take them back.
Izzy blinked.
“What?”
“When you talk about something you care about.” His voice stayed low, roughened by exhaustion and something harder to name. “You get this look on your face.”
The warmth rising into her cheeks caught her completely off guard.
For one brief second, she looked younger somehow. Less composed.
Grant seemed to realize what he’d said about half a second too late.
He looked away briefly, like he wasn’t used to saying things like that out loud.
Izzy looked down at the sketchbook, smiling despite herself.
“Well,” she murmured softly, “that was unexpectedly dangerous.”
Something low flickered through Grant’s expression then.
Not amusement exactly.
Something warmer.
Grant looked at the sketch of the young, dangerous-looking Wade Hollis.
“If Wade Hollis is involved…” Grant started, then stopped.
Whatever he’d been about to say, he seemed to think better of it.
His mouth tightened once. “Never mind. We’ll ask my dad at the party on Saturday.
He was the sheriff back then. If a woman went missing on this ridge or if there was any trouble at the Talley place, Burton would be the one with the file. ”
He glanced toward the dark window, then back to her, the kitchen light catching the golden thatch of his blonde hair and the rough, golden-brown grit of a five o’clock shadow along his jaw.
“I’m heading up to bed,” he said. “Go get some sleep, Izzy.”
“Then let’s hope your dad has a long memory,” she said, closing her laptop.
Grant nodded once, turned, and headed toward the stairs.
Izzy didn’t follow him right away. She stayed at the island for a few minutes, letting the frantic hum in her veins settle into something manageable.
She gathered their empty plates and carried them to the sink, running the warm water to rinse away the remnants of the Sunday sauce.
The domestic quiet of the kitchen felt strange, heavy with the ghost of their conversation.
Once the sink was clear, she gathered her laptop and the sketchbook against her, the heavy mystery of Clara’s life following her as she finally made her way up the stairs to the guest room.
Safe inside, she slipped out of her clothes and changed into her charcoal sleep clothes. She grabbed her toiletry bag, preparing for her nightly ritual—the meticulous, grounding routine of serums and skincare she refused to skip, even in the middle of a mountain valley.
Holding her bag, she stepped out into the hallway to head to the bathroom to brush her teeth.
Right as she reached the landing, the bathroom door clicked open.
Grant stepped out.