Read Chapter 23: A Tale of Two Pasts

The care home smelled of lavender and boiled vegetables, a combination that always made Imogen's stomach turn slightly. She found Mary Carrick in the conservatory, seated by the window with a shawl wrapped tight around her thin shoulders, watching gulls wheel above the grey sea.

"Mary," Imogen said softly, taking the seat beside her. "It's Imogen. Imogen Renfrew."

Mary turned, and for a moment her eyes were clear and sharp. "The girl who came back," she said. "You found the key."

"I did. Thanks to Toby. And you." Imogen pulled the folder from her bag, the one containing the photocopied deed and the email from Alfred Trevelyan. "We're trying to untangle some of the documents. There's a ledger—from 1947. The restorer in Penzance found it hidden behind the deed binding. He says it might have names in it. Old names."

Mary's fingers twitched on her lap, knitting at air. Her eyes drifted to the window, and she began to hum—a low, wavering tune that Imogen didn't recognize. Something old. Something sad.

"Mary? Do you know anything about the ledger?"

The humming stopped. Mary's gaze snapped back to Imogen with startling focus. "Morna," she whispered.

The name landed like a stone in still water.

"Morna? Who's Morna?"

But Mary had already retreated, her eyes going soft and distant again. She resumed her tune, rocking slightly in her chair. A nurse passed by and gave Imogen a sympathetic shrug. "She has her good moments," the nurse said quietly. "But they don't last long."

Imogen sat with Mary another twenty minutes, asking gentle questions that produced nothing but the same whispered name, repeated like a prayer. *Morna. Morna.* Finally she thanked the nurse and left, the name rattling around her head like a loose coin.

---

The church of St. Petroc stood at the edge of the village, its granite walls weathered by centuries of salt wind. Imogen hadn't been inside since her grandmother's funeral, when she was twelve and the whole affair had felt like a strange, adult ritual she wasn't part of.

The interior was cool and dim, lit by stained glass that cast coloured pools across the flagstone floor. A woman in her sixties was arranging flowers by the altar. She looked up as Imogen entered.

"Can I help you, my dear?"

"I'm looking for records. Baptismal records, specifically. From the 1920s or 30s."

The woman—Mrs. Pendry, according to her badge—led Imogen to a small room at the back of the church where ledgers and files were shelved in metal cabinets. "We had a flood a few years back. Some of the older records were damaged. What name are you looking for?"

Imogen hesitated. "Morna Renfrew."

Mrs. Pendry's eyebrows rose. "Renfrew. You're Dorothea's granddaughter, aren't you? I remember you as a little thing."

"Yes."

The woman said nothing more, just began pulling drawers and flipping through bound volumes. After several minutes she produced a battered ledger with water-stained pages, some of them stuck together with the residue of old damp.

"1920s and 30s are in here. It's not in the best shape, I'm afraid."

Imogen took the ledger to a reading table and began to turn the fragile pages, her fingers careful and slow. Years of names, births, weddings, deaths. Familiar Cornish surnames—Trevelyan, Penrose, Carrick, Renfrew.

She found it in the 1931 entries, the ink faded but still legible. *Morna Grace Renfrew, born 24 March, baptised 6 May 1931.* The parents listed: *Jonathan and Edith Renfrew.* Her grandmother's brother, then. Her great-uncle Jonathan's daughter.

Morna was her great-aunt.

But the rest of the page was damaged. A dark stain had eaten through the paper, dissolving the words written beneath the entry. Imogen held it up to the light, trying and failing to make out whatever had been recorded there. Annotations, perhaps. Or additional information about the child.

Nothing.

She sat back, the ledger open before her. A great-aunt she'd never heard of. A name her grandmother never once mentioned. And Mary Carrick, whose family had been locked in a feud with the Renfrews for generations, knew the name well enough to whisper it from the fog of her dementia.

Imogen photographed the page with her phone, then carefully closed the ledger and returned it to Mrs. Pendry with her thanks.

Outside, the wind had picked up. She stood on the church steps, looking out over the village, the harbour, the inn perched on its headland. Somewhere in that building—in the walls, in the foundations, in the hidden spaces her grandmother had never shown her—there was a story. A story Dorothea had chosen not to tell.

*Some debts are paid by silence.*

Imogen had recited those words to herself a dozen times now, trying to understand what they meant. What debt had Dorothea paid? What silence had she kept? And why had the secret of Morna been worth carrying to the grave?

Her phone buzzed. A message from Toby.

*How did it go with Mum?*

She stared at the screen for a long moment, then typed: *Can you meet me at the chapel? I need to show you something.*

---

The ruined chapel on the cliffs was barely more than a skeleton now—four walls of crumbling stone open to the sky, grass growing thick between the flagstones. The one where Toby and his mother had found the key. Where Toby said Dorothea had been standing the day Carrick drowned.

He was already there when she arrived, leaning against the low wall that had once been the south transept, watching her approach. The wind was strong today, whipping his dark hair across his forehead, tangling her own around her face.

"You found something," he said. It wasn't a question.

"Your mother told me a name. Morna."

Toby frowned. "Morna? I've never heard—"

"Renfrew. Morna Renfrew." Imogen pulled up the photo on her phone, held it out to him. "My grandmother had a brother, Jonathan. He had a daughter. Born 1931. I never knew she existed. My grandmother never mentioned her. Not once."

Toby studied the page, his brow furrowed. "The record's damaged."

"I know. But there's something else." She pocketed the phone. "The restorer in Penzance—Alfred Trevelyan—he found a guest ledger from 1947 hidden behind the deed binding. I'm supposed to pick it up tomorrow. Mary knew the name. She said it when I asked about the ledger, like they were connected."

"1947," Toby said slowly. "Morna would have been sixteen then."

Imogen nodded. "The age my grandmother was when the feud started. When the covenant was signed."

They stood in silence for a moment, the sea crashing against the rocks below, gulls crying overhead. Imogen could feel the weight of the past pressing down on her, the decades of secrets layered like sediment, buried under stone and reticence and the stubborn pride of two families who had chosen to hate rather than understand.

"There's more to this," she said quietly. "Than the covenant. Than the feud. I can feel it."

Toby stepped closer, close enough that she could smell salt and sawdust on his clothes. "What are you afraid of?"

Imogen looked up at him. She'd been asked that question before, in London, by Oliver. By Oliver, she'd given the easy answer: *that the inn will fail, that I'll lose everything I've put into it.* But standing here, with the ruins of a chapel at her back and the sea roaring below, the truth felt different. Sharper.

"That I've been running from something I don't understand," she said. "And it's been chasing me all along."

Toby's hand found hers, his fingers warm and rough against her palm. He didn't say anything, and for a moment that was enough.

Then his grip tightened. "Come with me," he said. "There's something I should have shown you days ago."

He led her through the gap in the chapel wall, down a narrow path that threaded between gorse bushes, to the edge of the cliff. Below them, the boathouse crouched at the waterline, its roof sagging, its walls streaked with salt and green.

"My grandfather kept a logbook there," he said. "From the boathouse, not the inn. Everything he saw from this shore. Who came and went. What he noticed."

Imogen looked down at the crumbling structure. "You think he recorded something. About my family."

"I think he recorded everything." Toby's voice was flat, careful. "He was a suspicious man. He didn't trust the Renfrews. Didn't trust my mother marrying her way into the family, either." He paused. "He wrote things down. Daily. For fifty years."

"Toby," Imogen said slowly, "are you telling me you have fifty years of Carrick observations about my family?"

He met her eyes, and there was something raw in his expression. "I'm telling you the key to the boathouse has been in my pocket for a week. And I'm telling you I should have given it to you the day we found the one in the chapel."

He pulled a rusted key from his pocket, held it out to her.

"I don't know what's in there," he said. "But I'm tired of secrets."