Chapter 1
Skye
By the time the police told me to stop calling, I already knew they had stopped looking.
They never admitted it outright, of course.
People like Detective Malcolm Kerr preferred softer words.
They talked about limited resources, active investigations, standard procedure, and following every available lead, but after three weeks of hearing the same carefully rehearsed responses, I'd learned how to translate them.
Every promise that they were doing everything possible really meant there was nothing left they believed they could do.
They refused to believe Isla had been taken.
Instead, they convinced themselves she had simply chosen to leave, as though the woman I'd spent the last eight years building a business beside would suddenly abandon everything without a word.
They ignored the increasingly strange messages she'd sent before she disappeared and dismissed the growing sense that something was terribly wrong.
According to them, she'd walked away from our company, our clients, and the future we'd worked so hard to create together.
I knew Isla better than anyone. She would never disappear willingly, and she certainly wouldn't leave me behind without a fight.
The office felt unnaturally quiet without her.
Usually, one of us was talking over the other from opposite sides of the studio while music drifted through the speakers and fabric samples covered every available surface.
We argued over wallpaper, laughed over impossible clients, celebrated contracts with takeaway coffee instead of champagne because there was always another deadline waiting for us.
Even our disagreements had become part of the rhythm of Thistle & Stone Interiors, the kind that only came from knowing another person well enough to predict the exact moment they were going to roll their eyes.
Now I could hear the old clock above the doorway ticking, a sound I had never noticed until Isla stopped answering me from the desk across the room, and I had come to hate it for emphasizing every second of her absence.
Her mug still sat beside her computer with the lipstick stain on its rim, while the tiny cactus she'd insisted she could keep alive despite killing every other plant she'd ever owned leaned toward the window, somehow healthier than either of us had expected.
Everything looked as though she had simply stepped out for lunch, except Isla had been gone for twenty-three days.
I stood in front of the large corkboard covering one wall of the studio, studying the photographs we'd pinned there during the renovation of Blackridge Hall.
The English estate had been one of the largest contracts we'd ever accepted, a sprawling nineteenth-century manor that the Covenant Renewal Foundation claimed was being transformed into a residential retreat for women recovering from trauma.
On paper it had sounded almost too good to be true.
Historic preservation. Unlimited budget.
Full creative freedom over the interiors while maintaining the building's original character.
Isla had practically danced around the office when we'd signed the agreement.
Now every photograph made my stomach tighten.
I stepped closer until my nose was almost touching the board.
At first glance, every photograph looked exactly as it should.
Blackridge Hall was breathtaking in the way only centuries-old estates could be, with elegant stone corridors, soaring ceilings, carved fireplaces, and staircases worn smooth by generations that had passed through them.
It was beautiful, rich with history, and exactly the kind of restoration project Isla and I had always dreamed of working on.
Yet the longer I studied the images, the stronger the unease settled in my chest. Beauty had a way of distracting people from what lay beneath it, and I was beginning to suspect someone had counted on that.
I reached for one of the photographs and held it beside the architectural plans spread across my desk, comparing every doorway and every measurement until my eyes ached.
The dimensions simply refused to line up.
They hadn't matched the first time I'd noticed the discrepancy either, but I'd convinced myself I was tired.
Historic buildings were notoriously unpredictable.
Foundations shifted over centuries, walls moved during renovations, and measurements that seemed impossible on paper often made perfect sense once you stood inside the room itself.
It was one of the reasons I loved restoring old buildings.
But Isla didn't make mistakes.
She measured everything three separate times before committing a single figure to a drawing.
Once, she'd driven two hours back to a client simply because she'd realized she'd written down a window opening as seventy-eight inches instead of seventy-seven and three-quarters.
She always laughed at herself afterward, calling it an obsession.
I called it the reason clients trusted her with buildings worth millions.
Slowly, I laid another photograph beside the first, then another after that, comparing each image against the plans until a pattern began to emerge.
Entire rooms appeared narrower than they should have been.
Windows occupied walls where no windows existed on the drawings, while one staircase ended several feet earlier than the official plans indicated.
These weren't the inconsistencies of an aging estate.
They were deliberate alterations hidden beneath careful restoration.
Someone hadn't simply renovated Blackridge Hall.
They had changed its very structure, disguising those changes well enough that only someone who understood buildings the way Isla did would ever notice.
The shrill ring of the office telephone shattered the silence, making me jump hard enough that one of the photographs slipped from my fingers. I glanced toward the display before reaching for the receiver, already knowing whatever waited on the other end wasn't going to be good news.
"Thistle & Stone."
"Miss Fraser?"
Detective Kerr.
Again.
"What now?"
A pause settled between us.
"I was hoping you'd come by the station."
My grip tightened around the receiver.
"Why?"
"We have a few more questions."
"You've had questions for three weeks."
"I know."
"You've searched her flat."
"Yes."
"You've spoken to every contractor."
"Yes."
"You've looked through her bank records."
"Yes."
"You've questioned me five separate times."
Another pause.
"We have."
I closed my eyes.
"So what changed?"
"We found her passport."
Every muscle in my body locked.
"What?"
"It was delivered anonymously this morning."
The room suddenly felt too warm.
"Where?"
"Reception."
"Inside an envelope."
"No fingerprints."
"No note."
I swallowed hard.
"She didn't leave voluntarily."
"We're not saying that."
"No," I replied quietly.
"You've been saying the opposite."
Kerr's silence told me everything I needed to know: despite a missing woman's passport being anonymously delivered to their station, they still weren't ready to believe Isla had been taken.
"I'm coming."
I hung up before he could say another word.
The station smelled of coffee, damp uniforms, and frustration. Detective Kerr met me outside the interview room carrying a clear evidence bag. Inside rested Isla's navy passport, its cover scratched near one corner exactly where she'd complained about dropping it outside Heathrow two years earlier.
I stared at it.
"Where was this found?"
"As I said..."
"I heard what you said."
I looked up at him.
"I'm asking where it came from."
"We don't know."
"Someone walked into a police station carrying a missing woman's passport and nobody saw them?"
"It was left on the front desk."
"When?"
"During shift change."
The timing was far too convenient to dismiss, and I held his gaze until he finally looked away first.
"May I?"
Detective Kerr handed me the evidence bag, and the instant it settled into my hands an uneasy feeling crept beneath my skin.
The passport itself looked untouched, carrying only the ordinary wear of travel, but something about the clear plastic sleeve protecting it felt wrong.
Tilting it beneath the fluorescent lights, I caught the faint glimmer of a scratch running across the surface.
It was so slight that almost anyone would have dismissed it as accidental damage, but Isla had always communicated through details other people overlooked.
I turned the bag slightly and another fine line caught the light, followed by a third.
They weren't random scratches at all. They were precise measuring marks, each separated by exactly one centimeter, the same subtle notation Isla used whenever she needed to indicate scale without writing directly onto a drawing.
My pulse began to hammer as the realization settled over me.
She had left this deliberately, trusting that I would recognize her work where no one else would.
I kept my expression carefully neutral, refusing to let Detective Kerr realize I had already seen something his entire department had missed.
Instead, I asked as casually as I could manage, "Have your forensic team looked at this?"
"They didn't find anything."
Of course they hadn't.
Because they weren't looking at it the way an interior designer would.
Back at the office, I locked the front door, closed every blind, and carried the passport straight to my worktable beneath the brightest drafting lamp.
For nearly an hour I examined every millimeter without finding anything, frustration mounting each time I reached the end and started over. I was beginning to wonder whether I had imagined the markings when something finally caught the light, and despite everything, I smiled.
"You clever woman."
Isla had never hidden clues where people expected to find them.
She'd hidden them where only I would think to look.
Inside the back cover, beneath the transparent protective sleeve, a paper-thin strip had been slipped between the layers.
I worked with painstaking care, easing the edge of the protective sleeve apart with the tip of one of my drafting knives until a folded piece of tracing paper slipped free from its hiding place.
It was scarcely larger than a business card, delicate enough that I was almost afraid to unfold it, yet the moment it lay open across my desk I understood exactly why Isla had hidden it there.
There were no frantic pleas for help or desperate explanations.
Instead, she'd trusted the language we both understood better than words.
A simple floor plan stretched across the page, showing a single corridor leading toward one staircase and one isolated room.
Beside an otherwise ordinary section of wall she'd written only four words.
West corridor still doesn't balance.
Anyone else would have assumed she was referring to a measurement error, but I knew better.
Isla never hid messages inside her drawings unless she expected me to find them.
She wasn't telling me to check the dimensions.
She was telling me the wall itself shouldn't exist. Somewhere inside Blackridge Hall, concealed behind carefully restored stonework and immaculate craftsmanship, was a hidden room, and Isla had discovered it before the people inside that building discovered what she knew.
My gaze drifted toward the empty desk across the office, and my fingers tightened around the fragile tracing paper until it crinkled softly beneath my hand, because for the first time since she'd vanished, it felt as though she was reaching back toward me.
"You left this for me."
Isla hadn't hidden the message for the police or the contractors.
She had hidden it for me, trusting that eight years of working side by side had given us a language other people would overlook.
More importantly, she knew me well enough to know I would never stop searching simply because someone in authority insisted there was nothing left to find.
Outside, Edinburgh continued with its ordinary rhythm as though the world hadn't shifted beneath my feet.
Cars rolled along rain-darkened streets, pedestrians hurried past carrying takeaway coffees and shopping bags, and somewhere beyond the office windows church bells drifted across the rooftops in the cool afternoon air.
Inside Thistle & Stone, surrounded by blueprints, fabric samples, and every memory we'd built together over the last eight years, I rested my hand against Isla's drawing and made myself a silent promise.
I no longer cared how many detectives told me to wait or how many officials insisted Isla had disappeared of her own choosing.
Someone had hidden the truth behind respectable charities, historic estates, and beautifully restored buildings, believing no one would ever think to look beneath the surface.
They had underestimated one thing—they had underestimated how well I knew the woman they had taken.
If tearing apart every stone of every estate in Britain was what it took to bring her home, then that was exactly what I intended to do.