Read Chapter 7: Postcards from Nowhere

The advertisement went out on Tuesday. By Thursday, the inbox on the ancient computer in the back office had exactly two inquiries, both from people asking if the inn was actually open or if the listing was a mistake from a defunct website. Imogen deleted them both and tried not to think about the peeling paint in the lobby or the way the sea air had corroded every hinge in the building.

She was halfway through scraping old varnish off the banister—a job she'd started at dawn out of pure spite for her own insomnia—when something clattered through the brass letter slot in the front door. The sound was sharp and metallic, and it bounced twice on the worn floorboards before settling.

Imogen set down the scraper and crossed the lobby. The mail was a single postcard, face down, the back covered in neat, tight handwriting. She flipped it over.

The image was familiar. Gull's Rest, photographed maybe forty years ago, before the extension had been added, before the paint had faded from its current weary blue to something even older. The roofline was clean, the windows bright, a cluster of hydrangeas blooming against the front wall where now there was only cracked concrete and a struggling rose bush. At the bottom, in faded white letters: *Greetings from Portmaw, Cornwall.*

She turned it back over. The stamp was New Zealand—a silver fern, a kiwi, bold colours that seemed too vivid for the aged cardstock. The postmark caught her eye first: it was dated three weeks after Dorothea Renfrew had died.

The address was right. *Mrs. Dorothea Renfrew, Gull's Rest, Portmaw, Cornwall.* Someone had crossed out a forwarding address in Auckland and written her grandmother's name and location over it in darker ink. But the postmark was the thing that didn't make sense. Three weeks after the funeral. Imogen had been there. She'd sorted through the first wave of condolence cards, answered the phone, sat in this very lobby and watched the mourners eat pasties and drink tea. No postcard had arrived then.

And it wasn't addressed to her. It wasn't even addressed to the estate. It was addressed to Dorothea, as if the sender didn't know she was gone.

Curious, Imogen read the message.

*Dotty—*

*Took the long way around as promised. You were right about the light here; it's nothing like home. But I've seen enough. I'll be home soon. Keep the kettle on.*

*Your loving brother,*

*Jasper*

Imogen read it twice. Then a third time, slower, as if the words might rearrange themselves into something that made sense.

Her grandmother had no brother. She'd had a sister—Margaret, who died before Imogen was born, the one whose name appeared on the faded wedding photograph that hung in the upstairs hallway. Imogen had grown up with the story of Margaret and Dorothea, the two Renfrew girls running the inn together after their parents died, Margaret's sudden illness, Dorothea's quiet grief. There had never been a Jasper. No uncles at all, great or otherwise. Her own father had been an only child, and he'd died when she was nineteen, leaving just her and her grandmother, two women rattling around in this old building like stones in a jar.

She turned the postcard over again, studying the photograph. The hydrangeas. The clean roofline. The absence of the extension that now housed the dingy breakfast room. She tried to remember if her grandmother had ever mentioned a brother, a wayward sibling, someone who'd gone to New Zealand. Nothing came. Not a single story, not a throwaway remark, not a photograph tucked away in an album.

"Jasper," she said aloud, testing the name. It felt foreign in her mouth. A name with no history attached, no face, no voice.

She thought about the ledger upstairs, the cryptic notes, the half-sketched map, the coded initials. *T* and *S.R.* Could Jasper be the *T*? The thought was speculative, but it coiled in her chest like a wire pulled tight. Her grandmother had secrets—that much was becoming clear—but a hidden brother seemed like a different order of secret entirely. That wasn't a coded note or a buried object. That was a whole person erased from the family story.

Imogen carried the postcard to the desk, sat down in her grandmother's creaking chair, and laid it flat beneath the banker's lamp. She read the message again, looking for subtext.

*Took the long way around as promised.* Promised to whom? But the postcard was addressed to Dorothea, so the promise had been to her. A promise between siblings. *You were right about the light here; it's nothing like home.* So Jasper had been travelling, and he and Dorothea had corresponded about it. She'd given him advice about somewhere—New Zealand, maybe—and he was writing to tell her she'd been right.

*I'll be home soon. Keep the kettle on.*

The informality of it stung. The casual assumption that Dorothea would still be there, that the kettle would still be on, that Gull's Rest would still be standing with its windows bright and its hydrangeas blooming. Jasper had written this postcard weeks after his sister's death, and he had no idea.

Imogen sat back. The chair protested with a groan of old springs. She looked at the postcard again, at the neat handwriting, and a darker thought surfaced.

She'd been in Portmaw for almost two weeks now. She'd cleaned the lobby, picked the lock on the office drawer, read the ledger, walked the cliff path, argued with a dead woman's solicitor, and run an inn for exactly one disastrous day. At no point had anyone mentioned a great-uncle. Not Pemberton, not Elias Penrose, not the couple who ran the newsagent's on the harbour front. Portmaw was a village. Everyone knew everyone's business, usually three generations back. If Dorothea Renfrew had a brother who was still alive and planning to come home, someone would have said something.

Unless they didn't know either. Unless Dorothea had hidden Jasper so completely that even the village gossip mill had nothing to grind.

Imogen flipped the postcard over once more, her thumb tracing the faded image of the inn. Then she turned it over, checking the address. *Forwarding address in Auckland.* If Jasper had been living in New Zealand for years, he might have a phone number. A way to be reached. But the postmark was from Wellington, not Auckland, which suggested he'd been travelling even within the country. The forwarding address—a street name, a number, all in the same neat hand—might still be current.

Or it might be forty years out of date.

She set the postcard down carefully, facedown, so she wouldn't have to look at that cheerful photograph while she thought. The inn was quiet around her, the kind of heavy silence that settles in old buildings when the sea wind drops and no guests are making demands. The radiator ticked. Somewhere upstairs, a floorboard settled.

*I'll be home soon.*

When? If Jasper had been planning to come home three weeks after his sister's death, he might already be in transit. He might arrive tomorrow, next week, next month. He might walk through that door expecting Dorothea at the kettle and find instead a stranger in her chair, a renovation project in her name, a For Sale sign metaphorically propped in the garden.

And what would happen then? If Jasper was a blood relative, did he have a claim on the inn? Imogen knew nothing about probate law, but the will had been read, the terms set. Pemberton had been thorough. But he hadn't mentioned a brother. Either Pemberton didn't know, or he did and had chosen not to say.

Imogen pulled the ledger out of her bag. She'd taken to carrying it with her, reading it in odd moments, trying to decode the fragments. She opened it to the page with the map, where the *X* marked Pencarrick cove and the words *He buried it there* sat in her grandmother's hand.

Maybe the *he* was Jasper.

The thought made her stomach drop. Her grandmother had hidden something, and her long-lost brother was coming home to collect it. Or to bury something of his own. Or to dig it up. She had no way of knowing. All she had was a postcard from nowhere and a name that had been erased from every story she'd ever been told.

She checked the calendar on her phone. Six days since the reading of the will. The summer stretched ahead of her, hot and uncertain, and somewhere out there, an uncle she'd never known was heading home to a sister who was already gone.

Imogen slid the postcard into the ledger, where it nestled against the map. Then she picked up the scraper, walked back to the banister, and began to work again. But she kept glancing at the door, half-expecting a knock from a man with one too few years and one too many questions.