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2026-05-08 20:24:57
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Tempted by my brother-in-law. RIDGE
Chapter 115RIDGEPOV: HazelWe went the next morning.Just us, the way Nikolai had said. No investigators, no family, no calls unless something was urgent enough to justify breaking the agreement we had made at the dinner table without saying it out loud.The city was doing its Saturday morning thing when we drove through it, slower than weekdays, the streets having a different quality of purpose, and the ridge road took us up and out of the density of it into the part of the city that was not quite city anymore.The house was at the end of the street the same way it had been yesterday.But yesterday we had gone there as buyers and today we went as the people it belonged to and that was a different kind of arriving.Nikolai had the key.Vera had given it to him last night before we left, produced it from her cardigan pocket as if she had been carrying it for some time, which she probably had, and handed it to him without ceremony and gone back to her chair.He unlocked the front door
Tempted by my brother-in-law. DINNER
Chapter 114DINNERPOV: HazelThe estate was lit from every window when we pulled through the gate.I noticed that first. The specific quality of a house that had people in it who were actually present rather than occupying separate rooms at a careful distance. Every window. Even the ones that were usually dark.We went inside.The noise hit immediately.Not loud exactly. But the layered sound of multiple conversations happening in proximity, which was something I had not heard in this house in all the months I had been in it. It had always been a house of careful silences and managed distances and now it sounded like something else entirely.I followed it to the dining room.My mother had expanded dinner to the large table.The one that had been set for two when Kaden had tried to have a careful conversation with me about things he was not ready to say directly. The one that seated twelve and had been used for formal family occasions and had never felt like a room where people actual
Tempted by my brother-in-law. FOURTH
FOURTHPOV: HazelShe had a letter.Not documentation. Not field notes. Not financial records.A letter.Written by Margaret to the Varyn family, addressed not to any specific person but to the family as a whole, given to a woman named Elsa who had been Margaret's neighbour in the city before the mountain, who was now eighty seven years old and had kept it in a box in her flat for sixty years because Margaret had said keep this until someone comes looking and Elsa had kept it because she was the kind of person who did what she said she would do.Nikolai asked her to stay where she was.He asked for her address and she gave it and he said we are two hours out and she said she would be awake, she did not sleep much anymore, age had that effect.We drove.The city came back toward us out of the dark and Nikolai drove and I sat beside him and thought about what a letter to the family meant. Not to him specifically. Not to Kaden or Vera or Arthur. To the family. The whole structure of it.
Tempted by my brother-in-law. COORDINATES
Chapter 112COORDINATESPOV: HazelWe left at four.Not first light. Not after dinner. Four in the afternoon with the coordinates on Nikolai's phone and three hours of daylight left and the mountain two hours out of the city.Kaden said he would handle dinner. He said our father could wait one evening, that he was not going anywhere, that the mountain had waited forty years and was apparently still waiting and we should go before the light went.I kissed my mother on the cheek on the way out.She handed me a jacket."It is cold up there," she said."I have a jacket," I said."That one is warmer," she said.I took hers.Nikolai drove fast without being reckless, the way he did everything, and the city fell away behind us and the roads opened and the mountain appeared on the horizon the way it always appeared, large and indifferent and entirely itself.We did not talk much.That was the thing about us on long drives. We had learned early that silence between us did not need filling and
Tempted by my brother-in-law. ARRIVALS
Chapter 111ARRIVALSPOV: NikolaiWe got to the airport in twenty minutes.Kaden had texted the terminal and the specific arrivals area and I drove and Hazel sat beside me and neither of us said much because there was not much that needed saying. My father was in a building twenty minutes away after ten years of being in a building four hours away and the gap between those two things was not something conversation could bridge before we got there.We parked and went inside.The arrivals hall was the specific organised chaos of a Friday afternoon, people with signs and people without signs, families in clusters, the particular energy of a space designed entirely around the moment of someone coming back.Kaden was near the barrier.He was standing very still in the way he stood when he was holding something significant and needed his body not to show it. He saw us and raised his hand slightly.We went to him.He looked at me."He is just through there," he said. "He collected his bag. H
Tempted by my brother-in-law. GIFT
Chapter 110GIFTPOV: NikolaiWe drove back to the estate without finishing the formalities with the agent.She had looked confused when I explained, briefly, that the purchase was being handled differently than expected, and had said she would follow up once the transfer details came through from Edinburgh, and we had thanked her and left and gotten in the car and Hazel had not said much on the way back because there was not much that fit into words yet.Fifteen years.Vera had bought the house fifteen years ago.She had been holding it that long, paying whatever it cost to maintain an empty house on a ridge, waiting for a reason to give it to someone, and she had found that reason in us without either of us knowing the house existed until this morning.We found her in the garden.Not the library. The garden, standing near the bench in the late morning light, looking at the roses that were apparently early this year, the same conversation she had had with Hazel on a different morning
Tempted by my brother-in-law. PHOTOGRAGH
PHOTOGRAPHPOV: HazelI looked at the photograph for a long time.My mother. Young, maybe twenty, standing outside the Varyn estate gates in a coat I did not recognise with her hair shorter than I had ever seen it and her face carrying none of the things the years had put there. She was looking at
Tempted by my brother-in-law. VERA
VERAPOV: HazelI ended the call and sat with it for a moment.Iris was still asleep against my chest and the mountain was doing its grey indifferent thing around us and Nikolai was watching me with the particular patience of a man who had learned that I needed a moment before I could be useful aft
Tempted by my brother-in-law. DEPORTED
DEPORTEDPOV: HazelI sat on the step outside the cabin with Iris in my lap.She had found a button on my coat and was working at it with the focused determination of someone who had identified a goal and was not going to be distracted from it. I let her work at it and held the phone to my ear and
Tempted by my brother-in-law. MOUNTAIN
MOUNTAINPOV: NikolaiI did not show anyone the message immediately.I stood in the lobby of Reeve's building with my phone in my hand and read it three more times and thought about Cold Stone Mountain and the months I had spent on it and the two kilometres I had been from the herb without knowing
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