Page 103 of The Clifftop Cottage

It stayed there.

Not Mum, not Steven.

Maisie.

She pulled out a chair and sat heavily, elbows on the table, head in her hands.

For a moment she thought she might cry.

Instead, she let out a short, brittle laugh.

“Obsession,” she muttered to the empty room. “That’s what it is, apparently.”

The word stung because it wasn’t entirely wrong.

Lucky padded in then, tail high, and circled her legs with a questioning chirrup.

She bent automatically to scratch behind his ears.

“I found you in worse weather than this,” she said softly. “Remember?”

He blinked up at her.

“I’m not very good at leaving things alone,” she murmured.

Lucky butted his head against her palm as if in agreement.

Her gaze drifted to the window over the sink, to the garden that lay dark and uneven beneath the moon. Its stone wall ran along the edge like a spine, pale in the gloom.

The initials were still there.

I. G.

Unapologetic.

She could just make out the small square of earth she had disturbed when she first uncovered them properly. A messy patch she hadn’t made neat again. She was too distracted then, too certain she was onto something.

There was more, she had thought.

There was always more.

She leaned back in the chair, staring at the faint outline of the old stone wall. The same stone that had built the cottage itself, she realised. Not separate at all, just an outer edge of the same structure. The same hands, perhaps. The same history running through both.

If something had been hidden in the garden, it could just as easily have been hidden within the house.

Maisie had found the empty box in the bedroom wall that afternoon weeks ago – her small fingers prising at loose plaster, triumphant at the discovery. They had both expected something extraordinary inside.

But it had contained nothing.

And yet it had led to more. One small discovery always did.

It had been Maisie who started the talk about initials, after Erica’s discovery in the garden.

They had been sitting at the table, chocolate melting on her fingers, talking about names – about marriage, about how letters rearranged themselves depending on who belonged to whom.

“Mine would be M. S. Maisie Stein,” she’d said proudly, as if reciting a spell.

“Your mummy’s would be different,” Erica had teased.