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“What is all this for, after all?” she asked. “Why can’t we live in the present and be open to what it might offer?”

There was no answer. There was never an answer.

And this time, the silence infuriated her beyond reason. “I’ve done everything I can to keep this place alive,” she spat, “and asked for nothing in return but a sign that I mean something. I can accept not having the gift of sight, but am I not worth a sign of your presence? Your love?”

She glared at the pile of detritus she’d put in the carpetbag. Dusty junk, worthless without the man who’d breathed life into this study.

“It’s not fair.” Tears flowed freely now, pouring down her cheeks and soaking the collar of her dress. She pulled out entire drawers from his desk, upending their contents onto the floor. “I gave up the chance for something important—someone who might love me. But you never came back for me, and neither did my mother or father⁠—”

A click sounded from the drawer she’d just opened, and she paused, blinking away the moisture, to see the bottom panel lifted at an angle.

A low chuckle escaped her. “Of course, you’d have a hidden compartment,” she said. Her grandfather’s knowing smirk appeared in her mind. “I’m impressed you kept it from me for so long.”

She lifted the false bottom and set it aside. As soon as she saw the box inside, her chest seized, releasing a broken sob. “So this is where you’ve been hiding it,” she grumbled.

No sense dwelling on sad memories.

“But this is the only piece I have of my mother and father.” These letters had been one of the few belongings she carried with her in that carpetbag on that tragic day years ago. She’d spent countless hours obsessing over every word, as though she could summon the spirits of her lost family through the power of longing alone. But it hadn’t been enough, and eventually she stopped reading them. And one day, the box vanished from her bedroom. While she thought of the letters often, she never examined the unexplained disappearance, instead adding it to the long list of things she’d lost before she was through with them.

She flipped through them slowly, absorbing snippets of text, chronicles of a wild and passionate love that ended in tragedy.

“You must miss her, too,” she said. Though her grandparents never discussed her wayward mother, they must have mourned in their own way. “I wish you’d talked about her more. I know you were disappointed in her choices, but she was still your child.”

She shifted a page, and her hand froze over a letter she didn’t recognize.

Dear Mr. Murphy,

I must confess that I have drafted this letter dozens of times, and you will likely not welcome any word from me, no matter how carefully worded. I understand I have long since forfeited any right to ask for your blessing, and I will not insult you by pretending otherwise. Yet I pray you will indulge me, as I can no longer let pride—yours or my own—stand between my honor and doing what is right, and the risk to both our names is one I am willing to take.

God knows society will forgive me for taking a mistress, though even speaking of such an arrangement plainly is considered a disgrace. But a sin far graver is having fallen in love with said woman, fathering a beautiful daughter, and keeping them both a secret. The shame is mine alone, though I will not pretend such an admission would not destroy your reputation along with my own.

And yet, I cannot continue to keep our love in the shadows. Your daughter—and your granddaughter—deserve far more. I began the process of divorcing my wife so that I can marry your daughter. Society’s judgment will not be kind to us, nor, I fear, to you. I do not expect you to forgive me for such a transgression. But I ask that when the ruin comes—and I believe it will—you not let it convince you the love beneath was worth any less. Your daughter’s love has set me free, and I pray the love of your granddaughter will set you free as well.

I remain,

Arthur Cadogan

The letter was dated a week before the accident that cleaved her life in two, separating her from her mother and father so violently. By the time it arrived at Ashveil, they may have already been dead. A message to her grandfather from a ghost.

But her father’s words weren’t alone on the page. Her grandfather’s sloping scrawl dotted the margins, as though the letter were an incantation he set out to interpret.

Love is worth the risk, he’d written below her father’s mention of risk.

A thick underline beneath love has set me free.

I will love her as much as you did.

A tear fell onto the paper, yet the ink did not smear, as though the words were indelible in their grief.

The events of the last several days slammed into her in sharp relief, a thunderclap striking her chest and illuminating everything she’d ignored. The message from the talking board—Free your dead—was never about Christina Cavendish, but about her. She’d been so busy curating a house full of spirits that she never grieved her own loss. What she thought was a warning or a threat was a mercy, a reminder to live for herself. Her family members had lived, and loved, and moved on.

Valebrook was her chance to live and love. And she’d pushed him away.

She let the letter drift to the floor, joining the pile of evidence of her grandfather’s passion and his grief. Had he spent his last years hoping to speak to her mother’s spirit, perhaps earn his forgiveness?

She would never know. And she could live with that mystery.

“I can hear you laughing.” She sniffed, then released a rueful gust of laughter. “There were much simpler messages you could have given me. Perhaps Kiss the earl, or chase love, not ghosts. You couldn’t have made things easier for me?”