Chapter 4 — Fragments of the Past

By midmorning the study was crowded, which was its own small comfort — a season ago Riley would have carried all of this alone.

Her father's back room, tucked behind Edgewood's central hall, smelled of dust and old ink and the faint metallic wrongness that had begun to seep into everything. She had cleared the wide table and laid out the journals and the shimmering pages, and now Elias stood at her shoulder while Lila bent over the maps and Kieran leaned in the doorway, arms crossed, weight off his bad leg, the cane he'd carried since the winter hooked over one wrist.