CHAPTER 10
Nana Returns—Lainie
The tea was cold.
Lainie sat at the kitchen counter with both hands around the mug, pressing her palms against ceramic that had stopped giving heat twenty minutes ago.
She'd made it at ten-thirty, chamomile, the kind that came in the yellow box, the kind that was supposed to help a person sleep. She hadn't taken a sip.
He hadn't come inside.
She'd noticed it an hour ago. Then again thirty minutes later. His boots weren't by the door. His mug was where he'd left it at 7 a.m. He'd been outside for hours, long past patrol, long past ward-checking, long past any reason a man needed to be standing in a vineyard after dark.
She should go find him. She should walk out to the well or the barn or wherever he was standing and ask what was wrong.
But the day had emptied her. The cereal box in the cabinet.
The email erasing itself. Jenna at five years old, drinking grape juice from a box with both hands, saying Mommy in a voice Lainie hadn't heard in eight years.
You're not imagining this. Kalen's thumbs on her wrists. The facts. The truth she'd needed him to say because her own head couldn't tell her anymore.
How did you bend time, anyway? The Collector already possessed powerful magic. Why did he need hers?
She shook her head and filed Kalen's absence the way she filed the late electric bill and the vineyard's February pruning schedule—in the part of her brain that would deal with it later, when later came, when she wasn't sitting in her kitchen at 11 p.m. with a mug of cold tea and the worst day of her life playing on a loop behind her eyes.
Jenna was asleep upstairs. Brennon and Hadlee in their rooms. The house was locked. The wards held, she couldn't feel them the way Kalen did, but the relic hadn't burned since the afternoon, and she'd learned to read its quiet as absence of threat.
She’d spent part of the day cleaning the spare room that nobody had used since she’d moved into the house. It still had the same furniture in it left by Charlie when he owned the house. She’d been so busy with the vineyard that she hadn’t given it much thought.
The watch rested against her chest. Warm. The baseline warm.
She stared at the untouched tea and thought about nothing. Then about everything.
The metal against her sternum changed.
A different quality, a deepening, the way a note on a piano deepens when you hold the pedal down.
The heat grew by slow degrees, and it carried a rhythm.
A pulse. It wasn’t her heartbeat. The ticking presence she'd come to know, the single patient beat that closed every chapter of this new life.
But this was a heartbeat. Slow. Steady. Someone else's.
Lainie's hand went to her chest. It pulsed under her palm. The beat was familiar, the way a song from childhood is familiar—you can't name it, but your mind and body know the tune.
The air in the kitchen shifted in density. The space between Lainie and the window over the sink thickened, like the air before a Florida thunderstorm, when the atmosphere packs tight, and your skin registers the pressure before your brain names it.
The fluorescent light changed in quality.
At first, she thought her tired eyes were imagining it.
The hard white softened, going golden, glowing warmer—the specific cast of late-afternoon sun through a window in a house Lainie hadn't visited since she was twelve.
It reminded her of the light of her grandmother's kitchen in the house on Braemar Road.
The light of Saturday visits and oatmeal cookies and a woman who said lass the way other people said sweetheart.
Nana stood by the window.
Lainie blinked hard to clear her vision. She was there the way a person was there when you looked up from your coffee and found them standing in the doorway, as if she'd been there all along, and you just hadn't noticed.
White hair pinned at the back. Soft blue cardigan, the one with the wooden buttons.
Reading glasses hanging from a chain around her neck.
She looked the way Lainie remembered her from the last good visit—not the hospital, not the funeral, not the thin gray woman in the bed at the end.
The kitchen version. The version who stood at the counter rolling shortbread dough and telling Lainie stories about Scotland in a voice that made every sentence sound like it ended with a wink.
She wasn’t see-through. She wasn’t lit from within, or any of those ghostly apparitions. She looked solid and present and real, a woman standing in a kitchen the way women in this family stood in kitchens, feet planted, hands at her sides, ready to feed someone or tell them the truth.
But the relic was beating against Lainie's chest in time with a heart that belonged to no one living.
Lainie's throat closed. The same constriction from the Jenna-at-five moment—the body's refusal to let sound out when the input was too large for the circuits to carry. But this time, the thing behind it didn’t conjure horror.
It was recognition. The metal against her skin was telling her: This is real.
This is not a distortion. This is not him.
"Sit down. You look like you haven't slept in days."
The voice was right. The accent—the soft Scottish burr that Lainie had tried to copy as a girl, standing in front of her bedroom mirror saying loch and bairn and aye until her sister banged on the wall and told her to stop being weird. The accent was right.
Nana's eyes were on the watch. She looked at it the way a person looks at something they lost a long time ago and never stopped missing. Love and grief and something else. The weight of a woman who made a choice she'd been paying for since before her granddaughter was born.
Lainie sat. Her legs made the decision for her. "How did you get the watch?"
She'd carried the question since she’d found it. Pieces of the answer lived in Nana's letter, in Mage Vir's library with its levitating pages, in the stories Kalen told about Connacht mages who built things that outlasted kingdoms. She'd never heard Nana's version. She'd never been able to ask.
Nana told her.
The way she'd always told stories. No filler, no padding, the emotional weight carried in what she didn't say. In the same tone she’d used to lecture Lainie as a teen about shaving her legs. And the way that I’ve never shaved a hair on my body was supposed to mean something to a thirteen-year-old.
Lainie flinched inwardly at the memory, realizing she was the same age then as Jenna today.
"A mage in Connacht made it. Early 1700s.
He created it for his daughter—not to give her power, but to protect the line.
His daughter passed it to her daughter. Her daughter passed it to hers.
" Nana's hands were folded in front of her.
She spoke the way she'd spoken when Lainie was small and the stories were about selkies and kelpies and things that lived in Scottish lochs.
"It crossed the sea with a McClure woman who left for Nova Scotia. It came to Scotland. It came to me."
She paused. Her eyes stayed on the chain at Lainie's collar. "It doesn't choose the strongest, lass. It chooses the one who needs it most."
The words smashed against Lainie’s heart.
In the place where she stored the things she believed about herself.
You can't do anything right. Nobody else will love you.
It hadn't landed in her life because she was special.
It landed because she was desperate. A woman in a hotel room with two children and no money and a bruise on her shoulder from a beer bottle. It found that woman and said: you.
The story unspooled from Nana's tongue as if she'd been waiting half a lifetime for someone to ask. She told the tale with the measured cadence of someone who'd cultivated both patience and regret, who weighed every word before she let it cross the boundary of her lips.
"It was a hard time, then," Nana said, leaning into the counter as if bracing herself against the weight of history.
"Ireland was not a safe place for folk like us.
The mage's line, they kept their heads down and their feet under them.
Didn't flaunt what was inside. But even so, there were always men who could sniff it out.
They hunted us, in their own way. Not with dogs, but with desperation.
The world was changing, and the magic was thinning, but the ones who remained …
well, they could sense when something important was about to leave the soil. "
Her eyes flicked to the window, the dark beyond it. "The watch was meant to keep his daughter alive. To carry her safe through a world that didn't want her to survive. But sometimes, lass, the things you make to save someone become the chain that tethers them to every hard choice, every day after."
Lainie felt it like a cold current at the base of her throat. "What happened to her?”
Nana smiled, not kindly. "She lived. She married a man who didn't ask questions. She had children, and she taught them to hide in plain sight. The watch passed to her daughter. Each time, it went to the one most in need of rescue, not the one best equipped to wield it."
The kitchen walls flickered with gold, a lighter and lighter shade, the sunlight from a memory Lainie had never personally owned. "Was it always a burden?"
Nana's hands, those practical, veined hands, pressed flat to the countertop, as though willing herself to stay present.
"Aye. But not always in the way you'd think.
Sometimes it gave more than it took. Sometimes it let them change things that were meant to be unmovable.
Sometimes it just bought them a day. Or an hour.
Or a heartbeat. And sometimes, it took all that and more, and left nothing but the ache. "
"It wasn't supposed to come to you," Lainie said, the words a confession and accusation at once.
Nana's laugh was a dry, invisible thing. "It never is."