Chapter 41

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Chapter 41 – Fragments of the Past

The house was quiet, too quiet.

Isla stood in the hallway of the manor, her hand resting on the banister that had once seemed too grand for her small palms as a child. Dust clung to the edges of the floorboards, and the scent of old paper and forgotten memories lingered in the air. Something had shifted inside her since uncovering the letters. They hadn't just been correspondence between old lovers—they were pieces of her mother’s soul, carefully folded and hidden.

Now, she couldn’t stop seeing her mother’s face in a different light. Not just as the woman who’d raised her, but as a woman who had once loved deeply, desperately, and perhaps... recklessly.

Victor Kane.

That name, once a ghost Isla avoided, had become an obsession. The letters spoke of him not just as a man, but as a tempest. A savior, a destroyer. And something inside her ached at the familiarity in his words—how easily they echoed the ones whispered to her in the dark by Christopher.

It made her sick.

And yet, she kept reading.

In the study, surrounded by her mother’s journals and crumbling photographs, Isla felt the past clawing at her sanity. She traced the edges of a faded photograph—her mother, young and vibrant, standing beside Victor. He wasn’t smiling, but his eyes said everything. Isla stared into those eyes until she felt a shiver run down her spine.

“I need to know,” she whispered.

She needed to understand the obsession her mother had. The same obsession she now felt bleeding into her own veins. It terrified her—how alike they were.

Christopher noticed the change. He watched her more, said less. His touch was gentler, almost too gentle—as if he was afraid she’d shatter under his fingers. And sometimes, Isla wanted to. Just to be held. Just to fall into something that would catch her.

But how could she fall when everything around her was cracked?

One night, as rain lashed against the windows and thunder curled low in the sky, Isla found herself drawn to the attic. Her heart pounded with each step. A box, hidden beneath an old tarpaulin, called to her like a buried heart.

Inside: letters that had never been sent. Her mother’s final words to Victor. Torn drafts, smudged with ink and tears. One line stood out:

"You broke me in a way that made me whole again. And I’m terrified Isla will love someone the same way."

Isla dropped the page.

Everything she feared was written there.

When Christopher found her hours later, curled against the attic wall, surrounded by her mother’s pain, she didn’t resist as he knelt beside her. His fingers brushed her hair back, and his voice broke with restraint.

“You don’t have to be her, Isla.”

She didn’t answer. Because she didn’t know where her mother ended and she began anymore.

And somewhere in the night, she thought she saw Victor Kane’s

shadow at the edge of her memory, grinning.