I park hard enough to make the tires skid slightly on the gravel and head for the door. Lark meets me halfway again, and that alone tells me she knows this is bad.
“What happened?” she asks.
I don’t answer with words. I hand her the photograph. Everything in her face changes. But I watch the color leave her cheeks, and the set of her mouth tighten around something colder than fear.
“What is this?”
“It was in my mail.”
Her eyes snap up to mine. “Today?”
“Yes.”
A long silence opens between us while wind moves through the porch chimes at the front of the house, and somewhere inside the inn, Bailey says something too far away to make out. Lark looks back down at the photograph.
“This isn’t just me anymore,” she says quietly.
No, it isn’t. It hasn’t been for a while, but this makes it impossible to pretend otherwise. Nolan comes to the door then. He sees the look on both our faces and stops.
“What now?”
I don’t like the roughness in my own voice when I say, “Someone was watching the farm.”
Nolan’s expression goes flat and cold in a way I’ve never seen before. Not jealousy. Not ego. Just calculation and concern. For once, I don’t hate him for being there. That probably means things are worse than I thought.
Lark hands him the photograph. He studies it for half a second, jaw hardening. It’s clear my initial thoughts that it might be him were incorrect. Or he’s really good at masking his emotions.
“That’s not yesterday’s weather.”
I blink.
He points at the tree line in the picture. “Ground’s dry. That was before the storm.”
Meaning Kenzie has been close longer than we knew. Meaning this isn’t a random escalation. Meaning she took the photo before she showed up at the station, before she stood in the inn doorway and smiled at Lark like she had every right in the world to do it.
“Don’t,” she says.
“I’m not going after her.”
That’s a lie for later, maybe. Not for now. Lark’s gaze holds mine like she knows exactly how thin the difference is.
“We do this right,” she says.
Nolan, unbelievably, backs her. “She’s right.”
For once, I don’t argue. Because the truth is, if I move on instinct right now, I’ll make it worse. Mac’s voice, Mom's silence, Hadley’s warning—everything lands at once and holds.
Do it right. Protect her by thinking, not by burning. The problem is, I’m running out of patience for thinking. And Kenzie is running out of time to learn what happens when people stop mistaking restraint for weakness.
Chapter Twenty-five – Lark
The photograph changes the feel of everything.
That’s the first thing I realize after Holt leaves the inn that afternoon to meet with Mac and the deputy and whoever else now gets to touch this mess because it has finally crossed the line from possibility into proof. Nothing outward shifts right away. The walls don’t close in. The floor doesn’t tilt. The windows still throw the same thin squares of light across the front hall, and the old house still smells like damp wood, plaster dust, and a history too stubborn to die quietly.
But underneath it, every room feels altered.
Every creak sounds a little more deliberate. Every passing car outside slows my attention without permission. The side gate that once felt like an inconvenience now reads like vulnerability. The footprint by the carriage house, ruined by rain and memory, settles deeper under my skin because it has context now.
