Chapter 10
"No," Nora whispered, a cold, sickening numbness rushing through her veins like poison. "No, this is wrong. This is a mistake."
Her gaze darted desperately across the drafting table, searching for some explanation, some rational thread to keep the world from fracturing into pieces.
Then her eyes landed on the wooden tray resting beside the lamp.
There, sitting in neat, orderly rows, were three professional calligraphy dip pens with brass ferrules.
Beside them rested a squat, heavy glass inkwell with a faded label: *J. Herbin Encre Brun Noyer – Walnut Sepia*.
The exact same rich, reddish-brown ink that had dissolved on page fifty-eight of her ledger.
Beneath the inkwell was a thick stack of loose, heavy parchment sheets.
Nora reached out, her hands shaking so violently she could hear the paper rattle as she lifted the top page.
It was filled with handwriting.
Not Silas’s broad, slanted carpenter’s scrawl.
It was Clara’s handwriting.
The sharp, upright letters. The aggressive, impatient punctuation. The sweeping, slashing crossbars on every capital T.
Except on this sheet, the sentences were repeated over and over, dozens of times, in varying degrees of perfection:
*The south-facing sash windows will stick until mid-May.* *The south-facing sash windows will stick until mid-May.* *Do not force them with a pry bar, Nora. You always were too impatient.* *Do not force them with a pry bar, Nora.*
Beneath the handwriting drills lay handwritten draft entries on yellow legal pads—hundreds of pages of personal notes written in Silas’s real hand, dated across three long, lonely years:
*“October 2020: Clara stared out the window for two hours today while I held her hand. She squeezed my fingers when I mentioned Nora’s name. Nora sent another brochure from Boston—some hotel lobby on Boylston Street. Nora looked tired in the staff photo. Her eyes looked dead. Clara would have hated that lobby. Clara would have told her to come home.”*
*“June 2021: Learned how Clara looped her capital Gs from an old recipe card in her kitchen drawer. It took forty tries to get the stroke pressure right. The ink has to look old. If Nora finds this, she needs to believe it was Clara. She won't listen to me. She doesn't even know me. But she’ll listen to her grandmother.”*
*“January 2022: Checked the municipal records for the 2021 IBC updates. Copied Section 2112 onto page forty-two. If Nora comes back, she won't have to fight the zoning board alone. I’ll make sure the book protects her from everything.”*
*“March 2023: Clara’s breathing is shallow. I promised her. I told her I’d bring Nora home. I told her I’d build the book. Two spoonfuls of sugar, Clara. I’ll make sure she brings the coffee.”*
Nora dropped the papers.
They fluttered onto the drafting table like dead leaves, scattering across the medical records and the ink bottles.
The room went dead silent. The whistling kettle on the hot plate clicked off with a sharp, final snap.
Every instruction. Every municipal code. Every warning about the sticky windows, the temperamental floorboards, the coffee orders, the scar over his brow.
Every single word of Clara’s supposed celestial matchmaking.
It was all him.
A meticulously forged monument of ink, paper, and calculated deceit.
Nora stood frozen over Silas’s drafting desk, her knuckles white as she gripped Clara’s clinical records certifying total cognitive decline years before the notebook was supposedly penned, her breath trapped like glass in her chest.
Behind her, the workshop door clicked open.
Footsteps crunched over the sawdust, light and unhurried.
Silas stepped through the drafting room doorway holding two steaming mugs of fresh coffee, the morning sun catching his unruly dark hair, his face open and smiling with the gentle, defenseless warmth she had believed her grandmother scripted for her.
"Brought the dark roast," he said softly, his voice full of quiet happiness. "Two sugars."
