Under the pounding at the door, I heard my own voice from years ago, laughing at our favorite café. “Hope,” I’d said. “It’s a cliché, but it’s what I cling to every time something goes wrong. That one word.”
Michael had smiled and tapped the sugar packet between his fingers. “Hope and patience,” he’d said. “You’re the hope. I’m the patience. That’s why we work.”
Hope.
I typed the date of our first meeting—06-14-2003—then added, on instinct, the word Hope at the end.
The screen flickered, then unlocked.
Relief made my knees weak.
The desktop was almost entirely empty, save for one single folder in the center. Its name made my breath catch.
FOR NAOMI.
The pounding at the door intensified. Someone tried the handle. It rattled violently but held—the key was still in the lock on the inside.
Ignoring them, I clicked the folder.
Inside were video files. Dozens of them. Each one labeled with a date spanning three years, from shortly after the time Michael must have received his diagnosis to a few months before his death.
I clicked the first.
Michael’s face filled the screen.
For a moment, my heart stopped, because it was him—not the worn, pallid version from his final days, but the man I remembered from our best years. His hair still mostly dark, only the slightest touch of gray at his temples. His skin warm and alive. The smile that slid across his mouth as he looked into the camera made something inside me ache so sharply I had to grip the edge of the table.
“Hi, my love,” he said.
His voice was clear and familiar, and it broke me in ways the hospital machines had not.
“If you’re seeing this,” he continued, “then I’m gone. And you’ve come to Blue Heron Ridge. I knew you would, eventually. I’m sorry I couldn’t bring you here myself. I’m sorry for a lot of things, actually, but we’ll get to that.”
The pounding on the front door jolted through the room. Michael’s recorded face glanced off the edge of the laptop toward the sound, as if he could hear it, which of course he couldn’t. The eerie timing made my skin prickle.
“I decided not to tell you and Sophie right away,” he said. “I know you’re probably furious hearing that. You have every right to be. I just… I couldn’t bear the thought of you living under that shadow for however long I had. I thought, if I can buy us a few years of normal, I’ll take the guilt.”
He looked straight into the camera.
“I used those years to build this house. To build… this sanctuary. For you. For Sophie. A place that wasn’t tied up in the mess of my family or my past. A place that could be purely ours, if you chose it. I poured everything I knew into making it something beautiful. Somewhere you could heal.”
Tears blurred the screen.
“And that brings me to the second thing,” he said. His expression darkened slightly, lines appearing at the corners of his mouth that I recognized as the ones that surfaced when he thought about his brothers. “My family. You’ve met them, briefly. Victor, Pierce, and Noah. You know what I’ve said—that they’re not part of my life for a reason. What you don’t know is how far they’re willing to go to get what they want. This house, this land, will be worth a lot. They know that. They’ve always believed that everything tied to our parents is theirs by right. They won’t see you as a person, Naomi. They’ll see you as an obstacle.”
