Read Chapter 22: The Tourist Trap

The kettle was still warm from breakfast when the first knock came—not the loose, hesitant tap of a guest needing extra towels, but a sharp, three-beat rap that belonged to someone who expected the door to open.

Imogen wiped her hands on her apron and crossed the dining room, past the half-cleared tables where the Saunders family had left crumbs and a crumpled map of the South West Coast Path. She pulled the door open and felt the world tilt.

Oliver stood on the step, squinting against the Cornish sun in a light linen shirt that cost more than the inn's monthly water bill. His city shoes were already dusted with sand. He looked exactly as she remembered him—which was the problem.

"Surprise," he said, with that easy smile she'd once found disarming and now found exhausting.

"Oliver." Her voice came out flat. "What are you doing here?"

"Checking on you." He stepped forward, and she had no choice but to let him into the hall. "You've been gone six weeks. You stopped answering my messages. The office said you'd taken extended leave and cited 'personal matters.'" He looked around at the peeling wallpaper, the warped floorboards, the framed photograph of the inn in 1923. "I had to see this place for myself."

"You drove from London?"

"Took the train to Penzance, hired a car." He shrugged. "It's not exactly the Cotswolds, but I can see the appeal. Fresh air. Character." His gaze landed on her, and softened. "You look tired, Immy."

She bristled at the nickname. Only Oliver called her that now, a shorthand from their early days that had become a habit he refused to drop.

"I'm running an inn," she said. "That's what tired looks like."

"Running it." He laughed, but there was an edge beneath it. "Or being run by it?"

Before she could answer, footsteps sounded on the stairs. Toby came down carrying a length of guttering under one arm, his sleeves pushed up, grease darkening his forearms. He stopped on the bottom step, taking in the scene—the polished stranger, the tension in Imogen's shoulders.

"Sorry," Toby said. "Didn't mean to interrupt. I'll take this out back."

"Toby, wait." Imogen's voice caught. "This is Oliver. Oliver, this is Toby. He's been helping with the repairs."

Oliver's smile tightened almost imperceptibly. "Toby." He extended a hand. "The one from the village, I presume?"

Toby shifted the guttering to his left hand and shook briefly. "One of them."

"Immy's told me about you," Oliver said, and Imogen felt the careful weight of the word *told*, as if it were loaded with implications that weren't there. But Oliver had never read the letters she'd never sent, the drafts she'd deleted. He knew only what she'd chosen to share: a boy from her past, helping with decaying property.

"Has she now." Toby's gaze flicked to Imogen, unreadable. "I'll be in the yard if you need me."

He disappeared through the kitchen door. The silence that followed was heavier than the sea air.

Oliver turned to her. "So. That's him."

"There's nothing to discuss about 'that's him.' He's helping me save this place."

"By what, hammering your gutters? Immy, be serious. You're an architect. You design buildings worth millions. You don't scrape salt off window frames in some dying fishing town."

"Truro's not dying," she said, though that wasn't the point and she knew it.

Oliver stepped closer, lowering his voice. "I didn't come here to fight. I came because I miss you. And I'm worried about you. You inherited some crumbling romantic relic from a great-aunt you barely knew, and you've convinced yourself you have to fix it. But you don't."

"I read the will."

"The will." He sighed. "The will that demands you run this place for a summer before you can sell it. Do you hear yourself? It's a sentimental trap, Immy. She's trying to guilt you into staying in a life you left behind. And it's working."

Imogen felt heat rise to her cheeks. "You haven't even seen the inn."

"I've seen enough." He gestured at the corridor, the collection of mismatched chairs in the parlour, the faded floral curtains. "Two hundred thousand pounds of repairs, according to the surveyor you told me about in that email—the one you actually bothered to answer, after making me wait three weeks."

She opened her mouth, but he pressed on.

"I can help you." He pulled a folded cheque from his breast pocket. The paper was crisper than anything in this building. "Fifty thousand. A loan—no, don't look at me like that. A loan. Zero interest. Pay me back when you sell. I want you free of this place, not buried under it."

"Half-ownership," she said quietly.

He blinked. "What?"

"You said in your last message—before I stopped replying—that you'd fund the renovations in exchange for half-ownership. I deleted it."

Oliver's jaw tightened. "That was a way to *help.* I knew you'd be too proud to accept a gift. A partnership would have given you capital and me a stake in something we could build together."

"This isn't a development project, Oliver." Her voice rose despite herself. "This is my family's home. This is history. And you're standing here in your city shoes treating it like a fixer-upper for your portfolio."

"It IS a fixer-upper."

"It's not yours!"

The words rang through the hall. In the kitchen, a pan clattered—Toby, still within earshot. Imogen didn't care anymore.

Oliver stared at her for a long moment. When he spoke, his voice was quieter, more dangerous. "You're never coming back to London, are you?"

"I don't know what I'm doing." She pressed a hand to her forehead. "But I know I'm not selling out to you just because it's easier than figuring this out myself."

"Easier." He laughed bitterly. "I've spent our entire relationship making things easier for you, Immy. Your commute, your deadlines, your anxiety about the promotion you never thought you deserved. And you still chose to run here, to *him*, to this—" he gestured vaguely at the ocean beyond the windows, "—this fantasy of a life you never actually had."

"I didn't choose Toby."

"Not yet." Oliver shook his head and held out the cheque. "Take it. A loan. Whatever you want to call it. I won't push half-ownership. I just want to know you're not drowning."

Imogen stared at the slip of paper. Fifty thousand. Nearly a quarter of what she needed. An escape hatch from the summer of scraping paint and swallowing pride, from the weight of Dorothea's silence and the mystery of the brass key and the strange, unsettling feeling that she was becoming someone she didn't recognize.

She took it.

Oliver's face softened with relief. "Immy—"

"Let me walk you out."

He paused, trying to read her. Then he nodded, and she led him to the front door. Outside, the gulls wheeled over the cove, and somewhere down the lane, a van rumbled past carrying lobster pots.

"Think about it," he said, touching her arm. "That's all I ask."

She nodded, not trusting her voice. He got into his rental car and drove away. She watched until the dust settled, then she turned and walked toward the yard.

Toby was there, up on the ladder, hammering the guttering back into place. He didn't look at her as she approached. He just said, "He loves you."

"Does he?"

"Probably." Toby adjusted the bracket. "Doesn't mean he's right for you."

Imogen looked down at the cheque in her hand. Fifty thousand pounds of conditions, of strings, of someone else's version of her future. She thought of Dorothea's words, the ones that had echoed through her dreams: *Some debts are paid by silence.*

But so were some loves.

She tore the cheque in half. Then in quarters. She let the pieces fall into the salt wind, and they danced away over the dunes like pale petals.

Behind her, Toby had gone very still on the ladder. He didn't say anything, but she felt his gaze on her back, a question she wasn't ready to answer.

Imogen walked past him into the kitchen, poured a glass of water, and drank it slowly, staring out at the empty lane where Oliver's car had vanished. Her phone buzzed in her pocket. A message from Alfred Trevelyan, the restorer in Penzance:

*Deed ready for collection. Will also need to discuss the second ledger I found behind the binding. Appears to be a copy of your great-aunt's guest book from 1947. Some interesting names in it.*

Imogen's thumb hovered over the keyboard. The inn creaked around her, settling into its old bones. She thought of the dream again—Dorothea standing on the cliffs, watching the water, refusing to turn around.

*Stop running,* the dream said. *Or keep running and never know why she stayed.*

She looked back out the window. The cheque pieces were already gone, swallowed by the wind and the tide. Fifty thousand pounds—most of the money she'd ever saved. Gone.

The inn's clock struck eleven, and from the yard came the steady rhythmic knock of Toby's hammer, patient as a heartbeat.

Imogen began to type her reply to Alfred, but her fingers hesitated over the words. Because there, at the edge of her vision, she saw it: a figure on the cliff path, a woman's silhouette, too distant to make out but wrong somehow—too still, too solid for a trick of the light.

She blinked, and it was gone.

But the feeling stayed, cold as sea spray on her skin: that Dorothea's secrets weren't buried beneath the chapel floor.

They were closer than that.

Much closer.