The lock turned with a clean, familiar click—like it knew me. Cold stone breathed through the key and into my palm.
My name is Rose Blackwood. I’m sixty-eight. A retired professor from a quiet Connecticut suburb. I never pictured myself inside a secret, let alone standing at the threshold of one. And yet, six months after Bart’s funeral, my doorbell rang at exactly 3:17 p.m.—so precise it unsettled me before I even opened the door.
A man in a charcoal suit waited on my porch, the wrong shape for my sleepy street. He carried a leather briefcase and spoke the way people do when they’re holding something heavy. He laid three items on my kitchen table: an ornate key, a letter in Bart’s unmistakable handwriting, and a card with a Highland address printed neatly beneath a crest.
He told me one thing, very clearly: Bart wanted this for me. For me alone. Not for the children—not yet—as if time itself were part of the plan.
When the lawyer left, the house felt like it had drawn a breath and refused to release it. I opened the letter. Bart’s looping script climbed the page, and I could hear him—teasing, warm, utterly sure of himself. He reminded me of the bet. The early years. The laughter we kept polishing into tradition. He wrote that the “impossible” was real. That he’d been assembling it quietly, piece by piece, all along.
After midnight, I searched the address. It existed—but only just. The internet admitted it without explanation, like a shrug. The images made my heart stutter in a way grief never had.
I told Perl and Oilia I needed time for myself. I didn’t mention the flight out of Hartford. Or the weight of a key in my coat pocket. Or the letter I’d folded and unfolded until it felt like cloth.
Scotland met me with wind and narrow roads that curled into the Highlands. When the address finally appeared—stone and shadow and sheer improbability—I parked and stared.
It was too ancient. Too vast. Too unlikely for two people who treated takeout as a splurge.
Still, I walked to the door. Love, even after loss, has a way of nudging you forward.
The key slid in and turned without resistance.
And then I heard it.
Not the hollow echo of an empty place—but a small, close sound from inside. Watchful. Present.
My fingers tightened on the handle. And before I pushed the door open, I understood—at last—why Bart sent me alone, and why our children weren’t meant to be here.
At least, not yet.
