Chapter 4 - The Secret in the East WingTwo weeks passed in a blur of flour, snowstorms, and quiet truces.
The blizzard had locked Blackwood Manor in a white prison, burying the gravel driveway beneath four feet of packed powder and cutting us off entirely from the village of Grey Haven. But inside the manor, the atmosphere was slowly, stubbornly shifting.
The girls had stopped whispering in the hallways. They started helping me prep meals, bringing down old family photo albums from the attic, and asking me about my life in the city before the wedding that never happened.
I never mentioned Colin. To the girls, my past life was a blank slate, much like theirs.
Julian, however, remained an enigma. He spent his days locked in his study, buried beneath blueprints, financial ledgers, and glowing computer monitors, only emerging late at night to check on the girls or stare out the frosted windows into the dark woods. We existed in a fragile orbit—crossing paths in the kitchen for midnight coffee or silent breakfasts, exchanging clipped nods, testing the boundaries of each other's endurance.
Yet, I noticed the small things.
I noticed how he always left a fresh log by the fireplace for the morning. I noticed how he quietly repaired the broken lock on Chloe’s bedroom door. And I noticed how his eyes tracked me across the room whenever I laughed with the children—as if laughter was a foreign language he was desperately trying to remember how to speak.
Then came the night of the broken lock.
It was 2:30 AM. The wind was howling off the river like a trapped animal, rattling the loose shingles on the roof. A sharp, cracking sound somewhere down the hall jolted me awake.
I sat up in my narrow bed in the third-floor guest room, pulling a thick flannel robe over my pajamas. Creeping out into the dark hallway, I saw a thin sliver of yellow light spilling out from beneath the heavy oak door at the far end of the north corridor—the door leading into the forbidden east wing.
Julian’s strict rule echoed in my mind: Stay out of the east wing.
But curiosity—and a nagging fear that one of the girls might be sleepwalking into danger—pushed me forward.
I padded silently across the polished hardwood floor, my bare feet making no sound, and stopped right outside the heavy oak door. It wasn't locked. In fact, it was pushed open about an inch.
I pressed my eye to the gap and looked inside.
The room wasn't a dusty, abandoned relic like the rest of the upper floors. It was a massive, vaulted artist’s studio, lit by the ghostly blue glow of the midnight snow reflecting off massive skylights. Canvases were stacked three deep against the walls, covered in drop cloths—except for one standing on a large wooden easel in the center of the room.
Julian stood before the easel.
He wasn't wearing his usual dark sweater or structured shirt. He stood bare-chested in the freezing studio, his back muscles rigid, holding a palette knife in one hand and a thick tube of oil paint in the other.
On the canvas was a portrait of a woman with long auburn hair and laughing green eyes, standing in a sunlit garden that looked nothing like the gloomy, frozen reality of Blackwood Manor. It was a masterpiece of raw, aching grief—every brushstroke charged with a love so fierce and desperate it made my chest ache just to look at it.
Julian raised the palette knife, his hand trembling violently. For a second, I thought he was going to slash the canvas—to destroy the ghost of the woman who had left him behind.
Instead, he dropped the knife, fell to his knees on the wooden floor, and buried his face in his hands.
A dry, shuddering sob ripped through his chest—the sound of a strong man breaking apart in the dark where nobody could see him.
My breath caught in my throat. I took an involuntary step back, my slipper brushing against a loose floorboard with a soft creak.
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In a fraction of a second, Julian’s head snapped up. His bloodshot eyes locked onto the doorway, flashing with fierce, primal panic.
Before I could turn and run, heavy footsteps thundered across the studio floor, the door swung wide open, and Julian’s massive hand shot out, grabbing my wrist in a grip of iron and dragging me into the dark.
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