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With a grunt, he pushed open the door and dropped his bag in the entryway. No one was there. The front desk where the newspaper’s diminutive secretary, Mr. Uglow, sat during the day was empty. There were no shouts or clangs of tools through the frosted-glass and wood door leading to the printing presses. Instead it was eerily silent as he’d only ever heard it after the last edition was out, when Moray would sit with a cigar and a glass of whisky, enjoying the momentary peace so unusual in his life.

“Moray,” Gavin called up the stairs. But almost as soon as the words were out of his mouth he stopped. There was another piece of paper on the first step leading to the offices.

He scooped it up. It was another sketch, and this time he knew exactly what he was looking at. In breathtakingly realistic detail, it showed a young woman standing with a hammer and chisel in her hand, frowning at the smiling face of a man seated on a little stool, his arms crossed and his mouth open as though in midsentence.

His heart skipped a beat. He held in his hand a drawing of the first time he’d inserted himself into Ina’s life all because he was fascinated by this young woman who spent her days in a tiny downstairs room rather than promenading in Princes Street Gardens or calling on friends.

Carefully he placed the drawing on top of the one he’d found outside and looked up the stairs. Another piece of paper sat six steps up, and he took them two by two to reach it. Snatching it up, he smiled. This time he and Ina were each crouched low in the saddle as they raced across Holyrood Park with Arthur’s Seat looming behind them in the background.

Another four steps up he found a drawing of Ina’s studio once again. This time she was carving an angel a church had commissioned years ago. He was sitting—in a full chair this time—with a book in hand, reading by candlelight as he kept her company. Emotion lodged in his throat. He’d never thought she’d remember such a simple, quiet time as this, but he’d never forget it, for it was in the quiet moments when he’d sat with her while she was carving this diminutive statue of Saint Catherine that he’d first fallen in love with her.

He took the next two steps more slowly now, but his heart was beating rapidly with the realization that this wasn’t just a random collection of drawings. Each mattered. They were all real moments of true connection in their friendship. They told him she’d noticed just as much as he had.

The next drawing was unmistakable. It showed Ina in an evening dress on her knees while he sat on a sofa in Mrs. Sullivan’s library the night she proposed to him.

Four steps up, their wedding day. This one was sketched as though a member of the audience was taking in the soaring altar that dwarfed Reverend Macdonough as he stood between the two of them, Ina’s long veil flowing out behind her.

The drawing after that sat only one step away. It was Ina in her dressing gown, standing just over the threshold of his bedroom on their wedding night.

The drawings were placed every other step now. The night he came to her bedroom to tell her about his job. The two of them eating sandwiches in her studio. The boat ride to Daldour Abbey. A drawing of them in Daldour Abbey that would make even a libertine blush. Them at breakfast. Them by the fire in their drawing room, each with a book in hand. The train ride to Oak Park. Him holding Ina while they sat on the window seat in her room at the manor house.

He clutched more than a dozen sketches in his hands now, and he was almost to the top of the stairs. He looked up, and pinned to Moray’s office door to cover the glass was one last sketch. He hurried up the stairs and nearly stumbled when it came into view. It was drawn as though by someone looking through the office door to Moray’s desk. Leaning against the desk with her arms braced on either side of her was Ina.

He dove for the handle, pushing open the door. His breath left his body when his eyes landed on his wife standing just as she’d drawn herself.

“Ina.” Her name was half groan, half prayer on his lips.

She let go of the desk, her hands coming together in front of her skirts as they always did when she was nervous.

Before she could say a word, he was across the room. Sketches scattered around their feet as he caught her up, one hand at her waist and the other cupping the back of her neck, and kissed her.

He kissed her as though he’d never kissed her before and would never kiss her again. She melted against him, and he poured everything into that kiss, because he’d known the moment he saw those sketches on the stairs that she’d told him exactly what he’d longed to hear all those years. She loved him.

Her fingers gripped the fabric of his jacket a little tighter, as though she never wanted to let go. But then she broke away. Still clinging to him, she leaned back to study his face.

“You’re kissing me,” she said.

“Yes, and I want to do it again.” He tried to bundle her in his arms, but she leaned back further, threatening to upset a pile of papers on Moray’s desk.

“I had an entire speech planned out where I was going to beg you for forgiveness,” she said.

“You can still give me the speech if it makes you happy.”

She shook her head. “I don’t understand. You’re supposed to be angry with me. Furious. You never wrote after I left you word. I thought you were gone forever.”

He frowned. “I never got anything in the post.”

She shook her head. “I left a letter with Grace.”

The letter Grace had given him had been from Ina. He’d been so wrapped up in his own anger and disappointment he hadn’t even considered that his wife might’ve tried to leave word explaining to him why she’d left.

“She only gave it to me two days ago, and I didn’t realize it was from you,” he said.

She pulled her shoulders back and let go of him. “Then I have things I must say.”

He smiled as he looked down at her. “So do I.”

“Me first,” she insisted. She swallowed, and then said, “I’ve been a coward for a long time.”