Terms of Entry

Chapter Two: Terms of Entry

ILYRA

Faced with him now, I understood how easily an attempt to make amends could become another kind of harm.

“Is something wrong?” he asked again.

I put my phone into my coat pocket. “A family matter.”

His eyes stayed on my face. I resisted the urge to explain. Anything I added would have been for my own comfort, and I had already done enough of that today.

“Do you need to leave?”

The question caught me off guard.

“I was just finishing.”

“That wasn’t what I asked.”

“No,” I said. “I don’t need to leave.”

He stepped inside. Rain darkened the shoulders of his coat, and there was mud along the edge of one shoe. This morning, I had been too frightened to notice much beyond his expression. Now I saw the tiredness beneath his eyes and a small cut beside his thumbnail, almost healed.

He looked towards the west wall.

“Mrs. Dacre sent me a photograph.”

“The initials?”

He nodded.

“I haven’t cleaned that area,” I said. “I only photographed it.”

“Can you?”

“Clean it?”

“Yes.”

“I’ll need to test the surface first.”

His mouth tightened. “You say that a great deal.”

“People tend to dislike discovering I’ve dissolved something irreplaceable.”

For a moment, I thought I had offended him. Then he looked at the wall again.

“Fair enough.”

I pulled the task lamp closer and angled it towards the flowers. He crouched without speaking, one hand resting on his knee.

The position unsettled me. Until then, he had occupied every room as though he expected it to resist him. Here, beneath the mural, he looked like someone searching for a dropped object.

I stayed beside the table.

After a while, he touched the stone beneath the painted flowers. Carefully, well away from the damaged surface.

“I thought these were higher.”

“You were smaller.”

“I know.”

But he remained where he was, studying the distance from the floor.

I wished I hadn’t said it.

A draught moved through the broken pane above us. He glanced up, and his expression closed.

“Has someone looked at that window?”

“The survey mentions it.”

“Has someone secured it?”

“Not yet.”

He stood and took out his phone.

“Keep everyone out of the conservatory until the damaged overhead panes have been secured,” he said when the call connected. “Tomorrow morning. Before she starts.”

He listened briefly.

“Then find someone who can.”

When he ended the call, I began putting the lamp away.

“You don’t have to stop on my account,” he said.

“The light’s going. And you’ve just closed my workplace.”

“I can have you moved into the house.”

“I need to work on the wall.”

He looked at me.

“The wall is difficult to move,” I added.

This time, something shifted at the corner of his mouth. It disappeared before I could be certain what it was.

“What have you found?”

I took my notebook from the table. Work was safer than silence.

“The worst damage appears to be concentrated beneath the broken windows. There are areas where the plaster sounds hollow, which suggests separation from the masonry. I’ll map those once it’s safe to use the platform.”

“Can the paintings be saved?”

“Some of them, certainly. More than your first assessment suggests.”

“And this part?”

His gaze returned to the flowers.

“I’m cautiously optimistic.”

He nodded once, accepting that more readily than I expected.

I opened the notebook to the page where I had recorded the measurements. A loose sheet slipped out and landed beside his shoe.

He picked it up before I could.

It was only my preliminary drawing of the room, with the damaged sections marked in pencil. Still, seeing it in his hand made my stomach contract.

He studied it.

“You’ve left the doorway blank.”

“I haven’t examined it yet.”

“Why?”

“I started with the areas actively losing paint.”

His thumb rested along the edge of the paper.

Then he handed it back.

“Let me know when you do.”

Something about the request made me look towards the entrance. The paint around the door was discoloured, but otherwise unremarkable.

“Is there something I should look for?”

“No.”

He answered too quickly.

I lowered my eyes to the notebook. “All right.”

He had secrets of his own. The thought offered no comfort.

At the doorway, he paused beside the camellias.

“Did anyone ask you to bring these?”

“No.”

“Or tell you they would be here?”

“No.”

He watched me for another second.

“If someone contacts you about this room, tell Severin.”

“What sort of contact?”

“Anything unusual.”

I looked at the flowers. Their white petals had begun to loosen around the centres.

“Should I be concerned?”

His attention returned to me.

“I’m asking you to be observant.”

There was a difference, apparently, though I wasn’t certain it would help me sleep.

He left before I could decide what else to ask.

TAVIAN

The gate records were in the third box.

I found them beneath a folder of insurance correspondence and a photograph of my father shaking hands with a police superintendent.

Someone had sorted everything after the investigation. Statements in one folder. Newspaper coverage in another. Death certificates, invoices, letters of condolence.

My mother’s death had generated an extraordinary amount of paperwork.

I had signed none of it. At twelve, my only contribution had been a statement recorded in a room that smelled of instant coffee.

Severin stood on the other side of the desk.

“The gardeners deny bringing the flowers,” he said.

“And the staff?”

“The same.”

“Someone’s lying.”

“Yes.”

I looked up. He didn’t offer the reassurance people usually reached for when they were uncomfortable.

It was one of the reasons I kept him.

“Miss Vale?” he asked.

“She says she didn’t bring them.”

“Do you believe her?”

“I don’t know her.”

He inclined his head.

I opened the gate log.

The old security system had been manual. Visitors signed in at the lodge, and a guard recorded the opening and closing times. My father had considered electronic systems an unnecessary expense until someone entered the estate and killed his wife.

Afterwards, he installed enough cameras to make the house feel occupied even when every room was empty.

On the day she died, a florist arrived at eleven fourteen. Two groundsmen returned from lunch at twelve fifty-three. A delivery driver left at one twenty-six.

Then nothing until the police arrived.

I read the page again.

“Who was at the lodge?”

“Edmund Rusk.”

“Alive?”

“As far as I know. He retired eight years ago.”

“Find him.”

Severin took out his phone but didn’t use it.

“What?”

“You’ve read that log before.”

“I was nineteen.”

“You asked the same question then.”

I looked at him.

He slipped the phone back into his pocket.

“Your father told you the guard left his post for a few minutes. The police accepted that someone could have entered during that interval.”

I remembered now. An argument in my father’s study. His insistence that I stop looking for competence where there had only been carelessness.

I had been drinking heavily that year. Some memories remained clear; others seemed to belong to someone I had heard about.

“Was Rusk dismissed?”

“No.”

“Why not?”

“Your father kept him on.”

For nearly eleven more years.

I set the log on the desk.

Severin glanced at the envelope beside my hand.

“Whoever sent that may simply know the old story.”

“Then I want to know which story they know.”

“And if the intention is to unsettle you?”

“They’ve managed it.”

The admission surprised us both.

I stood before he could answer.

“Have the gate mechanism checked. I want to know whether it could have been opened from inside the grounds without going through the lodge.”

“Now?”

“Nineteen years ago.”

He nodded.

At the door, he stopped.

“The conservator’s references are genuine. Her supervisor speaks highly of her.”

“You said that already.”

“Yes.”

I waited.

“She needs access to the paintings to do her work. If the room is now part of an investigation, we should tell her what she can touch.”

An investigation.

Until he said it, I had been thinking of the note as a private intrusion. Something meant for me alone.

“Photograph the entrance before she works on it,” I said. “Then let her continue.”

When he left, I sat down again.

The photograph on my phone was still open.

I enlarged the small blue flower until the edges broke apart.

My mother had let me paint it because I had complained there was nothing of mine on the wall.

For years, I had remembered that afternoon as happy.

Now I wondered what else had happened that day, and whether I had been too young to notice.

ILYRA

The flat above the bakery was warm when I got home. Someone downstairs had begun preparing dough for the morning, and the smell of yeast rose through the stairwell.

I locked my door, put my equipment by the radiator and stood in the middle of the kitchen without taking off my coat.

My father was waiting outside the studio when I first learned what he had done.

I remembered that evening in pieces. His car. Rain on the pavement. The way he had reached across to unlock the passenger door, smiling as if he had come to take me to dinner.

That had been six months ago.

Since then, I had discovered how much ordinary life a person could continue living around a terrible fact. Rent still came due. Teeth needed brushing. Clients wanted estimates.

Sometimes I would laugh at something and remember halfway through.

My phone vibrated.

I took it out reluctantly.

Have you left?

I typed yes.

The reply appeared almost at once.

Are you going back?

I put the phone on the counter.

Across the kitchen, a cupboard door hung slightly crooked. My father had fitted it when I moved in. He had spent an entire afternoon swearing at the hinges, then taken me out for food because neither of us had bought groceries.

I could still remember feeling loved.

That was the part I had no idea what to do with.

The phone rang.

I answered before I could lose my nerve.

“What did you mean earlier?”

“About what?”

“When I asked if she was painting.”

“I told you. We shouldn’t discuss this on the phone.”

“Then come here.”

“Ilyra—”

“Come here and tell me.”

Silence.

I sat at the kitchen table.

“Why did you go to her house?”

His breathing changed.

“We’ve been through this.”

“No. You told me something happened. Every time I ask you what happened, you tell me I’m upsetting myself.”

“Because you are.”

I pressed my palm against the table.

Outside, a scooter passed beneath the window. Someone called to a friend in the street.

“Did Tavian see you?”

“Stay away from that family.”

“Did he?”

“I don’t know.”

I closed my eyes.

It was the first answer he had given me that sounded unprepared.

“He was a child,” I said.

“I know how old he was.”

The sharpness in his voice made me sit back.

Neither of us spoke.

When he continued, he sounded tired.

“You think working there will help something. It won’t.”

“You don’t know why I took the job.”

“I’m your father.”

I looked at the crooked cupboard.

“Yes,” I said. “You are.”

He said my name, but I ended the call.

For a long time, I stayed at the table.

Then I opened my laptop and began transferring the day’s photographs.

There were eighty-six. Damaged plaster, lifting paint, water stains. The little flower and the initials beside it.

In the last photograph, taken before I packed away the camera, the conservatory windows reflected the room behind me.

Tavian stood near the entrance.

I hadn’t realised I had caught him in the frame.

He was looking at the wall with his hands in his pockets. Without the movement of speaking, without anyone waiting for an answer, the exhaustion in his face was unmistakable.

I closed the image.

A new email arrived from the studio.

Veyr Estate — Revised Survey Schedule.

Attached was a request for a detailed condition report and a proposal for stabilising the mural. The demolition deadline had been suspended pending assessment.

I read it twice.

Then I found Tavian’s initials in my photographs again.

For the first time since accepting the commission, I allowed myself to imagine the wall repaired.

The thought lasted only a moment before I pictured telling him who my father was.

I shut the laptop.

TAVIAN

At nine forty, Severin called.

“Rusk is dead,” he said.

I stood at my bedroom window. Beyond the lawn, the conservatory was a dark shape beneath the trees.

“When?”

“Last winter. His daughter’s agreed to speak with us tomorrow.”

“Did she say anything useful?”

“She remembers your father sending money. Regularly, until his death.”

I turned from the window.

“A pension?”

“She called it an arrangement.”

“Find the payments.”

“We’re looking.”

I waited. There was something else; I could hear it in his silence.

“The flowers,” he said. “The gardener recognised the cut.”

“What does that mean?”

“They’re from the north garden. The camellia house.”

I looked back towards the grounds.

The old camellia house was locked. It had been locked since the heating system failed three winters earlier.

“Who has a key?”

“We’re accounting for them now.”

I ended the call and went downstairs.

Mrs. Dacre was in the dining room, clearing a place that had been set for one.

“Did you eat?” she asked.

“Yes.”

She glanced at me, then at the untouched plate.

I pulled out the chair.

She made no comment as she returned the cover to the serving dish.

After a few minutes, she said, “Miss Vale asked whether we have any old photographs of the room.”

“Find her some.”

“I thought you might want to choose which ones.”

I put down my fork.

There were albums in the sitting room. My mother had labelled them herself. I had paid people to catalogue entire warehouses of art, but for nineteen years I had left those books where she put them.

“I’ll look tomorrow.”

Mrs. Dacre nodded.

She turned to leave, then hesitated.

“What?”

“Nothing.”

“Say it.”

“You used to like that room.”

I looked at the plate in front of me.

“I know.”

After she left, I sat there until the food went cold.

Then I went to the sitting room and opened the first album.