“Of course,” I said, as if that explained why they were tucked away behind the main house, voices low and hunched together quietly. “Always good to rehearse.”
Ethan’s smile came easily, but his eyes didn’t match it. “Timing’s everything, isn’t it?”
“Especially at weddings,” I said lightly.
That earned a short laugh, not quite genuine, but enough to close the gap. Emma tightened her grip on the folder she was holding, fingers white at the edges. “We should get back,” she said quickly.
“Sure,” Ethan said, his tone too casual. He lingered a moment longer, studying me like he wanted to gauge whether I’d actually heard anything. Then, with that same easy grin, he followed her up the path.
What had they been whispering about out here, behind the house where no one was meant to be?
Their voices had carried just enough for me to catch the edges of something. Not words exactly, but the feeling behind them, that low, urgent kind of tone that only comes with guilt, or desperation, or both.
I could still see Emma’s face, pale and set, her arms crossed in a way that suggested something far more explosive than going over some speech notes. And Ethan, all that charm, the easy grin, but his eyes flicked too fast. The look of a man trying to keep a dozen lies balanced and praying no one sneezed.
The question that lodged itself, annoyingly, was what exactly was he holding together?
I shook my head. It was ridiculous, really. I was seeing suspects everywhere.
But everything at Langston Estate seemed to be tangled together in ways that didn’t make sense.
People avoiding questions. Secrets tucked behind polite smiles. Too many coincidences for comfort.
And I knew that somewhere in all of it, something was waiting to come undone.
Chapter Twenty
I’d hit that point in the afternoon where my brain felt like an old sponge that had been wrung out and left on the sink, technically usable, but not really good for much.
Cleo had finally let me bully her into taking a break.
“Go,” I’d said, physically removing a pen from her hand. “Eat something that isn’t a breath mint.”
She’d made a protesting noise, then surrendered and wandered off in search of a very late sandwich and a view. I’d promised I’d keep the place from catching fire for an hour. The universe, as always, heard this and took it as a challenge.
I was halfway through drafting an email with the subject line ‘Please, for the love of God, do not move the arch again’; when Noah appeared in the doorway.
He didn’t knock, just filled the frame with his height and that steady energy he carried like a well-worn jacket.
“You’ve got a minute?” he asked, voice low enough that it didn’t quite disturb the calm. “I have to show you something.”
I swivelled in my chair, relief flaring at the idea of anything that wasn’t another RSVP update. “Please tell me it’s not another change from Lady Beaumont,” I said.
Noah’s mouth ticked, but the seriousness in his eyes didn’t move. “Nope,” he said. “Something else.”
I stared at him for a beat, trying to decide if he was joking. He wasn’t. The sensible part of my brain suggested I should at least save my work. The rest of me, the part that had been stuck in guest lists and colour palettes for eight hours, stood up so fast my chair rolled back and bumped the cabinet.
“Lead on.”
We slipped out of the office and through the corridor, the air shifting as soon as we left the heart of the house.
Noah moved with purpose, and I followed, heels tapping on the stone before the sound dulled into the carpet and then into the hollow thud of wooden steps as we turned towards the cellar stairwell.
The temperature dropped with every step down, warm to mild to cool.
The light narrowed, and the sound dulled. It always amazed me how a house could hold two different worlds inside it, above, chatter and flowers and lists; below, a hush that felt almost like deference.
At the bottom of the stairs it smelled of oak and stone, and the wet-chalk scent of old walls. A drop of condensation plinked somewhere to our left.
