Page 13 of The Clifftop Cottage

Her throat tightened. The pressure built, sharper now, urgent.

She stood abruptly. Thinking was the problem. She needed air. Space. Motion.

The house was quiet. Leah’s door closed. Maisie asleep.

Keys in hand, she was out the door, into the car, driving without really seeing the road ahead of her. Her breath came fast and shallow, her chest tight, as if something inside her were trying to force its way out.

The road ended where the path began.

She left the car and started walking, legs trembling with purpose. The last of the daylight bled across the horizon, the hills darkening – the same hills she’d watched earlier, when she’d still believed she might steady herself.

Rain needled through her clothes as she climbed. She didn’t slow. Couldn’t.

The path slicked beneath her boots. Her foot slid, her ankle twisting as she went down hard on one knee. Pain flared, sharp and grounding. She swore, pushed herself upright, and kept going.

By the time she reached the top, the wind was howling.

The sea churned below, black and endless. Rain plastered her hair to her face as she stood near the edge, breath tearing in and out of her chest.

Steven’s face surfaced unbidden – the careful concern, the tight line of his mouth.

This is the best place for you, Erica. Trust me.

The words she’d swallowed surged back.

You almost destroyed everything.

Unhinged.

The worst human being.

They beat against her skull. She clenched her fists, nails biting into her palms.

She had trusted him.

And he had walked away with everything she’d built, her work, her name, the life that had once fit her so precisely.

The wind roared.

And for a moment, she didn’t know how she was supposed to stand back up when every version of herself felt stripped away.

She gasped for air.

The night gave nothing back.

5

Gabriel took his father’s walking stick from its familiar place by the door, the worn wood fitting easily into his palm. The weight of it steadied him. He wondered, not for the first time, when something stopped being borrowed and became inherited. When care quietly turned into responsibility.

Chep padded at his heels, silent but alert, ears pricked, body taut with expectation, as though he understood the importance of this nightly ritual.

Outside, the wind tore through the narrow street. Gabriel turned up the collar of his coat as he stepped outside, the cold biting at his cheeks. He grimaced. It was darker than he’d expected.

But there was no choice.

He’d already lost too much time.

The night’s earlier chaos clung to him still, the acrid scent of smoke caught in his clothes and hair. He’d spent hours on the hill-fire – a reckless blaze, no doubt started by someone who thought they could control it. A “tidy-up,” they’d say. A bit of old knowledge passed down and misused. All it took was one shift in the wind, and the hillside had gone up like tinder.