Page 116 of The Clifftop Cottage

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The cottage was quiet in a way it hadn’t been the night before.

Leah and Maisie had left after midnight, their car lights sweeping briefly across the garden wall before disappearing down the lane. Gabriel had gone not long after.

Now it was just Erica.

And Lucky.

The morning had arrived pale and slow, a thin wash of light creeping across the kitchen floor. Erica stood by the sink with a mug of coffee growing cold in her hands, staring at the box on the table.

She had been standing there for what felt like hours.

The lid was closed again, the old wood dull in the morning light, as though nothing remarkable had ever been inside it.

But she couldn’t shake the feeling.

Something about it tugged at her.

Lucky jumped up onto the table with the confidence of a cat who believed all surfaces existed for him. He sniffed the edge of the box. Then sat down beside it, watching her.

Erica frowned at him.

“What?”

Lucky blinked slowly and gave a low, satisfied purr.

“You wouldn’t understand,” she muttered. “But I just need to read … one.”

His tail flicked as if in mild judgement.

Erica sighed, pushed her mug aside and lifted the lid again.

The letters lay exactly where Gabriel had placed them the night before, bundled neatly with faded twine. Even in daylight they looked fragile, the paper soft with age.

Lucky leaned closer to inspect them.

“Oh no you don’t.”

She gently nudged him off the table. He landed with a soft thump and stalked to the windowsill in protest.

Erica hesitated, then crossed to the dresser and pulled out a pair of thin wool gloves.

If any of her old lecturers could see her now, rummaging through eighteenth-century correspondence alone in a cottage kitchen without a museum archivist breathing down her neck, they would probably faint.

She returned to the table and slipped the gloves on.

Carefully, she lifted the bundle.

The twine was wound tightly around the letters. Too tightly to untie without disturbing the whole thing.

“That feels wrong,” she murmured.

She turned the bundle over slowly.

And then she saw it.

A smaller envelope tucked at the back, half hidden beneath the twine.