Agnes never kept the shop closed during business hours. Even when she’d come down with the flu a few years back, she’d had a local girl pop in and run things for a few days for her.
I tried the door and was surprised to find it locked.
Was this because of me? Was she literally locking me out? Worry niggled in my stomach. Was I pushing her too hard? Stepping over her boundaries? I didn’t want to make her feel unsafe or upset with me, but this went well past just some lovesick man mooning after a woman. I was her friend first, and I knew that something was wrong that she wasn’t telling me.
Frowning, I walked to the entrance that led to her flat. The door was unlocked—which was also unlike her—and I climbed the narrow stairs with a growing sense of unease.
“Agnes?” I called out, knocking on her door. “It’s Graham. I brought scones.”
No answer.
“Agnes, if you don’t open this door in the next thirty seconds, I’m going to assume you’ve been murdered and break it down.”
A long pause. And then I sighed in relief when I heard movement in the flat, and then the door swung open. My eyebrows hit my hairline.
As much as I hated to say it, she looked terrible.
Her hair was piled in a short messy tail sticking out atan odd angle from her head, with curls falling down every which way. She was buried in an ancient hoodie, and dark circles smudged her beautiful eyes.
“Och, Agnes. Are you unwell then? Do you need me to run to the pharmacy for you?” I asked, convinced she must have taken ill.
“No, I’m just …” Agnes shook her head and glanced behind her. I looked over her head to see absolute carnage behind her.
The kitchen table was buried. Papers covered every inch of the surface—old letters, photographs, books, and pages of Agnes’s own handwriting covered in notes and questions and connecting arrows. More papers were spread across the counter, the chairs, even parts of the floor. It looked like a research project had exploded. I instantly thought of the meme of the lad from the TV showIt’s Always Sunny in Philadelphiastanding by a white board with little red lines connecting evidence and a crazed look on his face.
“What the hell is all this?” I pushed past Agnes, ignoring her mewl of distress. “Are you planning a war, Agnes?”
Agnes closed the door behind me, her expression shifting from exhausted to wary. “Nothing. Just some family history I’ve been looking into.”
“This isn’t nothing.” I set the scones on the one clear corner of the counter and picked up one of the notebooks. It was Agnes’s handwriting and a neat list of questions.Who was she? What did she do? Castle records? Check archives.
“Graham, give that to me.” Agnes marched over andsnatched the notebook out of my hand. I crossed my arms over my chest, giving Agnes a long look.
“What’s this about then?”
“Just … something with an ancestor. It’s not important.”
“Look at this mess.” I swept out my hand. “And you didn’t even open the shop today. You say it’s not important?”
Agnes tugged on her left earlobe, and I narrowed in on it.
“See? You’re lying.”
“Damn it, Graham. Why must you be so pushy?” Agnes glowered at me, looking like an enraged sprite, her brow furrowing. I wanted to scoop her up and carry her to bed and kiss her until all the wires in that magnificent brain of hers crossed and she became so flustered that the only thing left she could tell me was the truth.
“It’s family stuff. It would bore you to tears, I’m sure of it.”
“You’ve been up all night researching boring old history?”
“I got curious about something my grandmother mentioned, and I went down a rabbit hole.” She gathered more papers, stacking them haphazardly. “You know how I get.”
I did know. Agnes could lose entire weekends to research if something caught her interest. I’d once watched her spend six hours tracking down the origin of a book because she needed to know if it had really belonged to a minor Scottish poet.
But this felt different. It wasn’t hyper fixation borneout of curiosity or something fun. Her shoulders were stiff, and her expression guarded. The fact that she’d closed the shop—her shop, her baby, her pride and joy—to sit in her flat surrounded by papers like some kind of beautiful, sleep-deprived conspiracy theorist meant this was serious.
“Agnes.”
“What?”
