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Isla
publish date:
2026-04-23 00:56:35
Latest chapter
OFF LIMITS What Comes After
CHAPTER TWENTY NINE POV: Damon The letter arrived on a Friday. Not a text this time. Not a message through a lawyer or a submission through the court. An actual letter. Physical. Handwritten. Posted from an address in Edinburgh that Damon didn’t recognise and that turned out, when Daniel checked, to belong to a hospice on the outskirts of the city. He sat with it unopened for two hours. On the kitchen table in his flat. The flat that now had Zara’s reading glasses on the nightstand and her tea in the cupboard and two of her jumpers on the chair that were still technically temporary. He sat across from the letter and drank his coffee and looked at the handwriting on the front and didn’t open it. He called Zara at 9. She answered immediately. She always answered immediately which was something he’d noticed and never said out loud because saying it out loud would make him examine why it mattered so much and he wasn’t ready for that examination. “There’s a letter,” he said. A pau
OFF LIMITS The Table
CHAPTER TWENTY EIGHTPOV: ZaraNobody planned it.That was the thing she kept coming back to afterward. Nobody had organised it or suggested it or sent a group message saying come to dinner. It just happened the way the best things happened, organically, almost accidentally, because a collection of people ended up in the same place at the same time and Marcus Cole was constitutionally incapable of letting anyone leave his house hungry.It started with Isla.After the hearing she was standing on the courthouse steps in the cold looking at her phone with the expression of someone who had done something large and was now experiencing the specific quietness of after. Damon had gone to her. Zara had watched him cross the steps and stand beside her and say something she couldn’t hear and Isla had looked up and whatever passed between them was private and real and she’d looked away to give them the space of it.Marcus had appeared at her elbow.“We should feed that woman,” he said quietly.“
OFF LIMITS Three Months Later
CHAPTER TWENTY SEVENPOV: DamonThree months looked like this.Sunday dinners that ran too long because Marcus always had more to say. Zara’s things appearing in his flat in the way that someone’s things appeared when neither person had made a decision but both people had made a decision, her reading glasses on his nightstand, her specific brand of tea in his cupboard, two of her jumpers on the chair by the window that she claimed was temporary and had been there for six weeks.Phone calls with Isla every Thursday. Not scheduled. Just… Thursday had become the day. She’d call or he’d call and they’d talk about Edinburgh and architecture and occasionally about Sandra and occasionally about Clara and it was always heavy and always worth it.Daniel. Regularly. The investigation moving through its channels with the slow certainty of something built properly.And Osei.Osei who had not been charged yet but who was being circled by something that had his name on it. Whose assets were frozen.
OFF LIMITS Ground Rules
CHAPTER TWENTY SIXPOV: ZaraMarcus made a list.An actual physical list. On a piece of paper. In his handwriting which was large and slightly chaotic and completely earnest. He put it on the kitchen table Sunday morning between the coffee and the toast like it was a legal document requiring signatures.Zara picked it up.Read it.Put it back down.“Marcus,” she said.“Don’t,” he said. “Read it properly.”She picked it up again.Ground Rules (Non Negotiable)1. No kissing in the kitchen when I’m trying to cook.2. No kissing in the living room when I’m trying to watch something.3. No kissing anywhere I might walk into without warning.4. Actually, a general warning system. Some kind of signal. TBD.5. Damon still does the onions. This doesn’t change.6. Nobody tells Dad before I do. I want to see his face.7. Zara, you still owe me for the burgundy walls. This does not cancel that debt.8. Damon, you owe me more now. The debt has increased significantly.9. Sunday dinners are still S
OFF LIMITS Out Loud
CHAPTER TWENTY FIVE POV: Marcus He’d been holding it for a week. Not the anger. The anger had moved through him fast and loud the way anger always did with Marcus, present and total and then gone, leaving something quieter behind. Not forgiveness exactly. Something that came before forgiveness. The place you stood while you were deciding what forgiveness was going to cost you and whether you could afford it. He’d been standing in that place for a week. They came back from Edinburgh on Saturday evening. He heard the door. Heard Zara’s voice in the hallway and Damon’s underneath it. Heard the specific quality of two people who had been through something together and had come back changed by it in a way that was visible even in the way they moved through a doorway. He was in the kitchen. He stayed in the kitchen. Let them come to him. Zara came in first. She looked at him. He looked at her. Something passed between them that was old and sibling and didn’t need words. “Good tri
OFF LIMITS Isla
CHAPTER TWENTY FOUR POV: Damon He waited three days. Not because he wasn’t ready. Because he needed to understand what ready meant before he walked into another room that was going to rearrange something permanent inside him. He looked at the number every day. In the morning with coffee. Last thing at night. Turning it over. Thinking about a 24 year old woman in Edinburgh who had been looking for a thread that led back to her mother and had ended up finding Ryan Ashford instead and had waited anyway. That kind of patience came from somewhere. He wanted to know where. Thursday morning he told Zara he was going to call. She was at the kitchen table with her laptop. She looked up. Closed the laptop. “Do you want me to leave,” she said. “No,” he said. Immediately. She stayed. He called. It rang twice. “Hello.” Young voice. Scottish. Guarded in the way of someone who’d learned to be guarded young and hadn’t fully unlearned it. “Isla Reid,” he said. A pause. “Yes,” she said
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