Chapter 16
Heather—Present Day
W ithout Flynn’s boots in the hall or his lazy morning whistle drifting from the kitchen, Glenoran felt taller somehow: its ceilings higher, its shadows deeper. The kind of quiet that let you hear your own heartbeat whether you wanted to or not.
Byrdie padded after Heather from room to room, pretending it was coincidence she never fell more than a single step behind. Her tail flicked in complaint if Heather moved too quickly, as if to say: A bsolutely not, Mother, we travel as one.
They’d driven back from Dingwall at dusk, the sky bruised purple over the hills.
Flynn had kissed her at the door before heading for Edinburgh; his crew needed him early.
“I’ll meet ye at the museum tomorrow,” he’d promised, his thumb brushing her cheek like a blessing. “We’ll talk to Dr. Henderson together.”
Then he was gone in taillights and the steady fade of gravel crunching, and Glenoran exhaled into silence.
Heather switched on a lamp in the study. Its honeyed glow pooled over Eilidh’s scattered papers. So many dates. So many marginal notes in her mother’s neat, unfussy hand.
She traced Eleanor’s return address with a fingertip, feeling again the jolt of closeness.
“Tomorrow,” she told the room. Or maybe she told her mother. “I’ll ask Dr. Henderson what you didn’t tell anyone else.”
Byrdie hopped onto the desk and sat squarely on a notebook, pinning it with both paws and a look that clearly said: no more secrets tonight.
Heather scratched her ears. Byrdie purred like a tiny generator.
But the day’s revelations hadn’t bought her peace. For every answer, two new questions sprouted in its place. When her eyes finally ached from reading, she turned off the lamp and climbed the stairs. Glenoran murmured around her and Byrdie pattered faithfully at her heels.
She slid beneath the duvet. Byrdie curled into the warm crook of her side as rain blew softly against the windows. Sleep hovered just out of reach.
My mother told me… someday I would buy…
Her mind drifted, slipping toward the fragile edge of rest—
A car door thumped.
Not loud. Almost polite. But it cut the quiet clean in half.
Heather’s eyes snapped open. Byrdie lifted her head, ears flat, her purr dying mid-rumble.
Another sound followed: tires crunching wet gravel.
The drive. Not the lane.
Someone had come all the way up.
“Flynn?” she whispered, though she already knew. Flynn didn’t drive like a ghost. He announced himself with reckless headlights and the occasional swear.
She slipped from bed, staying close to the wall. Moonlight pushed through a break in the clouds and silvered the yard.
Down by the gate, a car sat crooked in the dark, engine ticking as it cooled.
A man stepped out.
He shut the door quietly. Too quietly.
A flashlight switched on. Its beam skimmed the hedges, the front steps, the study window. Slow. Deliberate.
Heather’s stomach coiled. No one stumbled onto Glenoran. Not unless they were looking for something—or someone.
She reached back and slid the brass latch across the bedroom door. The click sounded like a gunshot in the hush.
The beam paused at the study window. Her mind leapt instantly to the papers strewn across the desk—Eilidh’s handwriting, Eleanor’s address exposed in plain sight.
Byrdie crept closer, pressed against Heather’s ankle, tail puffed to twice its normal size. Her low rumble wasn’t a purr this time; it was a warning.
The flashlight drifted. Then lifted. Then stopped exactly where Heather stood behind the curtain.
Her breath caught.
The light didn’t move.
Enough.
She threw on the overhead switch. The room exploded into brightness—curtain, bed, her silhouette stark against the window.
Outside, the man jerked. The flashlight veered wildly. He stumbled back, then sprinted for the car. The engine coughed, caught, and the tires spat gravel as he peeled away, red taillights disappearing down the lane.
Heather stayed where she was. The silence surged back around her like a tide.
Byrdie launched herself into her arms, tucking her head beneath Heather’s chin the way she only did during storms.
“It’s all right,” Heather whispered, though neither of them quite believed it. “We’re all right.”
She kept the lamp on. Watched the empty drive. One minute. Five. Ten. Nothing.
Her thoughts slid backward, unbidden, to that day at Loch Arkaig.
The figure in the mist.
The unblinking stare.
The man with the sluice box… the one who’d watched her, not the water.
A chill rippled her skin.
Same build?
Same stillness?
Same wrongness?
She didn’t know.
But she knew this:
He hadn’t come to steal.
He’d come to look.
Heather set Byrdie gently on the bed and pulled on jeans beneath her robe. Boots next. Not to go outside—she wasn’t suicidal—but to do something other than stand frozen.
She made a slow lap of the upstairs hall. Listened at the landing. Watched from the stairwell. Glenoran breathed around her, old and stubborn and familiar.
Back in her room, she left the curtains half-drawn and sat at the foot of the bed. Phone face-down on her thigh.
She could call Flynn. He’d be here in an hour, storming through any man who dared walk her garden.
She could call the police. Report “a suspicious figure” and answer the polite confusion of a constable who’d never heard of Glenoran House.
But instead she sat very still.
And let the truth settle:
Whoever he was, he wasn’t after the house.
He was after the story.
Her mother’s story.
Her story.
She picked up Byrdie again, the cat’s heartbeat quick beneath her palm. “All right,” she whispered. “If you’re watching me, then watch me walk forward.”
Tomorrow she’d lock up Eilidh’s papers, speak to Dr. Flora Henderson, and drag every shadow into daylight.
But tonight she turned off the overhead lamp, leaving only the warm pool of gold from the bedside light.
A lighthouse glow in a house built to withstand storms.
She lay back down, Byrdie curled into the hollow of her arm, and let the dark become just a room again.