Read Chapter 32: The Storm Again

The first drop of rain hit the window like a fingernail tapping glass. Elowen looked up from the ledger, her eyes meeting Lillian's across the library table. They had been comparing dates, cross-referencing the payments against the calendar of Lillian's captivity, but the sound pulled them both back to the present.

Outside, the sky had turned the colour of a bruise.

"Not again," Lillian breathed, her fingers curling around the edge of the table.

Merrick entered from the corridor, carrying an armful of storm shutters. He set them down by the window and began fitting the first one into place. "The sea changes fast this time of year. The forecast said nothing, but it lies as often as it tells."

Elowen stood and moved to the casement, watching the horizon swallow the light. The waves had already grown teeth, whitecaps foaming in the distance. A gull screamed somewhere overhead, then vanished into the thickening grey.

"The solicitor," she said, her voice tight. "If he's still in the tunnel—"

"He'll shelter in the caves until it passes." Merrick's hands worked steadily on the shutter. "The tunnel floods halfway up in a storm like this. He'll be trapped there until morning, at worst. The ledger is safe on this side of the chapel door."

Elowen wanted to argue, but she knew he was right. The sea was a wall now, and no one moved through it until it tired.

The rain came in sheets, battering the ancient glass. Merrick finished the shutters and moved to light the lamps. The electricity flickered once, twice, and then died entirely, plunging them into a darkness that smelled of oil and cold stone.

Lillian laughed, a thin, startled sound. "Six years of candles. I'd almost forgotten what a real sky looked like, but I find I haven't forgotten how to lose power."

Elowen struck a match and touched it to the wick of the nearest lamp. The flame caught, steady and small, carving a circle of gold from the shadows. She looked from her sister to Merrick, and understood, with a strange pang, that she was the third point of a triangle that no longer needed her to complete it.

"The storm will blow through by dawn," Merrick said. He was watching Lillian, his gaze soft and hungry in a way that made Elowen look away. "We should make a fire in the parlour. It's the most sheltered room in the house. The old timbers groan, but they hold."

They gathered in the parlour, dragging cushions and blankets from the bedrooms. Merrick built the fire from driftwood he'd stacked in the shed—salt-cured and dry, it caught quickly and burned blue at the edges. The three of them settled around it, and the storm became a distant animal, howling outside the walls.

Elowen watched her sister. Lillian had wrapped herself in a grey wool blanket, her face hollowed by six years of poor light and smaller food. But her eyes were alive in a way they hadn't been a week ago. They kept finding Merrick, and leaving him, and finding him again.

"You never told me," Lillian said quietly, addressing the fire rather than either of them, "what you did with my letters."

Merrick's hand stilled on the piece of driftwood he was feeding to the flame. "I kept them."

"All of them?"

"Every one." He looked up. "I know you thought I burned them. I know you thought I moved on. But I couldn't. I told myself you were alive somewhere, and that if I kept them, somehow you'd come back to claim them."

The fire popped and spat. Lillian's lower lip trembled, and Elowen felt her own throat tighten.

"They're in a tin box," Merrick continued. "In my study. Salt-stained, like everything else in this house, but legible. I read them once a year. On the anniversary of your death."

"I wrote you so many." Lillian's voice was barely a whisper. "Before Bridie stopped them reaching the post. Before she told me you'd come to the house and accepted my father's story. That you'd believed I was gone and moved on."

"I never believed. I never could." He rose and crossed the room, stopping before Lillian's chair. He knelt, so that his face was level with hers. "When Maeve told me you'd been gravely ill and needed quiet—that you'd chosen a hidden life to recover—I believed her because I wanted to. I convinced myself that was love. But I should have burned the world down looking for you. I should have."

Lillian's hand emerged from the blanket, trembling, and touched his cheek. She traced the line of his jaw, the grey at his temples that hadn't been there when she'd known him. "You're older, Merrick."

"So are you."

"I'm so tired."

"I know." He closed his eyes. "Let me carry it for a while."

She leaned forward, and he met her halfway, and the kiss was not a thing of fire or passion but of grief, of six years of silence finally breaking against each other. It was salt and tears and the smell of rain on dry wool.

Elowen looked down at her own hands. She had known, of course. She had known since the letters began arriving, since she'd read Merrick's words describing Lillian's laugh, her stubbornness, the way she hummed when she read. The letters had been meant for Lillian, and Elowen had stolen them, devoured them, letting them write a story in her heart about a man who might love her.

But he had never loved her. He had loved Lillian, and Lillian had loved him, and Elowen had been writing a beautiful novel about a love that was never hers to claim.

She rose quietly. The two of them didn't notice her, wrapped as they were in each other's arms, foreheads pressed together, speaking in half-words and broken sentences. The storm raged, and they were safe, and Elowen understood that her role in this story was to let them be.

She slipped from the parlour into the dark corridor. The lamps she'd carried had been left behind, but she knew the way to the kitchen by memory. She needed air, water, something to do with her hands.

The kitchen window rattled in its frame. She pressed her palms against the cold stone of the wall and forced herself to breathe. The ache in her chest was a dull, familiar thing—the ache of being the sister left behind, the observer, the writer standing outside the story she thought she was in.

A sound came from below.

She froze. It wasn't the storm. It was too deliberate, too rhythmic. A scraping sound, metal on stone. Coming from the cellar stairs.

Then it stopped.

Elowen waited, her heart hammering. She'd left the cellar door open when they'd retreated upstairs, the door that connected to the passage leading toward the shore tunnel. The one her father's solicitor had entered hours ago.

The scraping resumed, closer this time.

She looked around the kitchen for a weapon and found the long iron poker by the range. She lifted it, feeling its weight, cold and certain in her grip.

The cellar door, at the far end of the kitchen, began to move.

She raised the poker, stepped forward, and waited.