What had Graham even beendoing?
Coming in all sexy and brooding and just … taking care of me?
It was decidedly flustering, that’s what it was, and I’d already sent him a text message reminding him not to come in the nextday.
He hadn’t replied. Of course he hadn’t. The man was infuriating on a good day.
Sighing, I returned to the box and brushed off a fine layer of dust that made me feel guilty. How long had it been since I’d opened it? Two years? Three? After Gran died, I’d gone through everything once. I’d found letters and photographs and a pressed flower from her honeymoon—all the artifacts of her life that had made me tear up. I’d opened it a couple of times since then, lightly sifting through, but hadn’t found anything specific that spoke about the loch.
Maybe I hadn’t been looking for the right things.Maybe I’d just been missing the woman who had meant so much to me to be able to delve for more.
I poured myself a glass of wine, pulled the box toward me, and lifted the lid.
The smell hit me first, that soft dried lavender. Gran had kept sachets of lavender in all her storage boxes and drawers, and it instantly transformed me back to being a wee girl, reading at her knee as she knitted.
She was the one who made me believe in magick.
She’d listened as I told her about the fairytales I was reading, often adding her own spin or Scottish myth to it, and she’d told me, repeatedly, to always believe that there was more to the world than I could see. I’d spent my childhood looking for fairies in the trees and dragons rising from the mist that clung to the shores of Loch Mirren because of Gran.
I missed her.
The top layer was photographs, all of which I’d seen before. Gran as a young woman, standing outside this verybuilding before it was a bookshop. Gran and Grandad on their wedding day, both of them squinting into the sun, looking impossibly young and happy. Gran holding my mother as a baby, her expression fierce with love.
I set the photographs aside and dug deeper.
Her letters were next. Bundles of them, tied with faded ribbon. I’d skimmed these before—most were correspondence between Gran and her sister, who’d moved to Edinburgh after her husband drowned. The letters were full of ordinary things like recipes, gossip, and the favorite pastime of complaining about the weather. I’d found them comforting the first time I’d read them, evidence that life went on even after tragedy.
“You need to think like a researcher, Agnes.” I gently scolded myself and untied the first bundle and spread the letters across the table, scanning for anything I might have missed. Dates, names, references to the family history, anything that might make any sense or offer a clue.
...the anniversary is always hard, but I find if I keep busy...
...do you ever wonder if we’re meant to be alone? Sometimes I think the choosing was done for us long ago...
I paused on that last line.The choosing was done for us long ago.What did that mean?
Had her sister known about it too? Had all the Wright women known, passing the warning down like a poisoned, unwanted inheritance?
I kept reading, but the letters grew more mundane as the years went on.
“There’s nothing here.” I sighed and took a sip of my wine, frustrated. “Did you think it would be easy, Agnes?”
I set the letters aside and reached deeper into the box.
My fingers brushed leather.
I pulled out a small book, barely larger than my palm, bound in dark brown leather worn soft with age. The cover was blank—no title, no markings—and when I opened it, the spine cracked like it hadn’t been touched in decades.
The handwriting inside was old-fashioned, the letters formed in a style I associated with Victorian documents. But the date on the first page made my breath catch.
March 1817
This wasn’t Gran’s diary. This was something much older.
How had I missed this before? Had it been tucked beneath something else, hidden in a corner I hadn’t bothered to explore? Or had I simply not been ready to find it?
I flipped to the first entry, my heart pounding.
3rd March, 1817
