The Last Blueprint

The Last Blueprint (Book 3) Some love stories run out of time. Thea and Silas are trying to outrun theirs. A year into renovating haunted houses — and each other's hearts — Thea Molyneux and Silas Blackwood are close to finally proving how Silas really died and clearing his name after more than a century. But Silas is starting to forget. Minutes slip away from him now. Then hours. And neither of them knows how many more he has before there isn't enough of him left to save. With the anniversary of his death only weeks away and Harold Prescott running out of moves — and patience — Thea and Silas stake everything on one last season: finish the investigation, expose the truth in front of the whole town, and find out whether a hundred and thirty-one years of waiting can end in something other than goodbye. It means confronting the man who's spent his life protecting his family's oldest secret. It means finally proving what happened the night Silas died. And it means Thea has to face the one question she's been avoiding since the day she met him: what do you do when you've found the person you want forever, and forever was never actually on the table? Perfect for readers who love: ghost + human detective duos · haunted mansion renovations · witty banter · gothic secrets with cozy stakes · guaranteed happy ending.

T he carriage house had good bones, which was the highest compliment Silas Blackwood was capable of paying anything that wasn’t a person, and even then only on his better days. Thea had learned to hear the compliment inside the complaint by now — a year of practice will do that — and she stood in the middle of the swept-out floor with her tablet against her hip and let him have his inspection. It was a small stone building, square and stubborn, tucked at the north edge of the Blackwood property. Somebody in 1960-something had knocked out the original carriage doors and turned it into a garage with all the tenderness of a man in a hurry, and it had been sulking about the indignity ever since. But under the bad slab and the worse wiring, the shell was true. She could feel it the way she felt these things now, in the soles of her feet and the flats of her hands — the particular soundness of a structure built by someone who cared, for someone he expected to outlive him. “The roofline is sound,” he said, drifting along the exposed rafters with the proprietary air of a man inspecting a building he’d designed over a century ago and still, apparently, held a personal grudge against for aging. “The stonework needs repointing, but that’s cosmetic. Whoever converted this into a garage in the 1960s should be found and made to answer for it.” “They’re definitely dead, Silas.” “Then they should be found and made to answer for it in whatever capacity the afterlife permits. I have opinions about their choices, and eternity, apparently, is a very long time to sit on them.” Thea laughed, ran her hand along a support beam gone silver with age, and felt the particular, settled contentment that came from standing in a building she was about to spend the next four months arguing with a ghost about. The beam was chestnut — she’d bet her tape measure on it, the old kind you couldn’t buy anymore because the blight had taken every last tree of it a lifetime ago — dense, close-grained, the kind of wood modern lumber only dreamed about. Somebody had pegged the joints instead of nailing them, and chamfered the underside of the tie beam, a small decorative bevel nobody would ever look up and notice, purely because leaving an edge square would have offended him. She knew exactly who that somebody was. He was currently hovering three feet above her head, scowling at a water stain. It was early August, a golden late-summer afternoon that made even a half-collapsed carriage house look like a postcard, and Blackwood Manor sat behind them, whole and cared-for and — after nearly a year — unmistakably home. Through the gap where the garage door used to be she could see it: the turrets he insisted made a house look appropriately serious, the dark green paint they’d fought over for three weeks, the porch she’d rebuilt board by board with her own hands and a great deal of unsolicited advice. Somewhere down the hill a lawn mower droned and quit, droned and quit. The air smelled of hot stone and cut grass and the faint green rot of the pond at the property’s low edge, and under all of it, always, the dry-paper smell of the manor itself — plaster and old wood and a hundred and thirty-eight years of somebody’s life. It had been a good year. A genuinely, uncomplicatedly good year, if you didn’t count the parts that weren’t uncomplicated at all. She checked her tablet, where the season’s work sat laid out in the tidy columns that made her feel briefly, falsely, like a woman in control of her life. “Marcus wants to start on the roof Thursday,” she said. “Danny’s bringing his own crew for the stonework — he says, and I quote, ’if I’m gonna get haunted again I might as well get paid for it twice.’” “Danny remains an excellent judge of value for money, if a poor judge of ghost etiquette.” “Patricia’s coming by tomorrow to sign off on the foundation assessment.” She said it lightly, another line on the list, but she was watching him as she said it — a habit lately, pretending to read her own screen, the way you kept half an eye on a pot you weren’t sure would boil over. Because the thing was, Molyneux & Blackwood Design Studio had crews now. It had a foundation engineer and a permit process and more work this summer than the two of them could reasonably do — which was a miracle, given that one half of the partnership couldn’t sign a contract, appear on a job site, or be seen by roughly ninety-nine percent of the people who paid the invoices. The town had decided, in the way small towns decide things, that Thea Molyneux was simply gifted and a little odd, that she talked to herself on ladders, and that the results spoke for themselves. Thornfield Hollow had built the whole architecture of a normal life around the thing at its center that was not normal at all, and it had done it so gently she sometimes forgot to be grateful for it. He was more solid these days — had been, gradually, for months, ever since the Hartwell letter had confirmed what they’d both already believed. Where a year ago he’d been little more than a suggestion of a man, a cold place and a voice and a shape you had to want very badly to see, now he held an edge in daylight. She could make out the fine seam where his collar met his throat, the particular set of his jaw. But there was a strain under it that hadn’t been there before — a flicker at the edges that came and went without warning, the ghost-equivalent, she’d started to think, of a man who hadn’t slept properly in a long time. When he drifted through a bar of afternoon sun it got worse, like a candle guttering in a draft only he could feel, and she had learned not to comment on it, because commenting made him hold himself together harder, and holding himself together cost him something she was afraid to add up. “How are you feeling?” “I’m dead. I don’t feel, in the conventional sense.” “Silas.” He stopped his inspection of the rafters and looked at her properly, and for a moment the performance dropped away entirely — the wit, the superiority, the long-practiced composure — and what was left was something rawer. “Tired,” he admitted. “In whatever sense that word applies to something like me. I lost twenty minutes yesterday. I was standing in the library-study, and then I was standing in the library-study forty minutes later than I remembered it being, with no account of the time between.” His voice was carefully even, the way it got when he was working very hard to sound less frightened than he was. “It’s happening more often. Margaret noticed it too, last week. She didn’t say anything, but I could see her doing the arithmetic.” Thea’s hand had gone still on the chestnut beam. Buildings, she thought, did not forget how to be buildings. You could leave one standing empty for fifty years and it would still know exactly where every load wanted to go. It was only people — only the ones you loved, only the impossible ones — who could stand right in front of you in the golden light and quietly, terribly, start to come apart at the joints. He’d told her about the first lapse in March and tried to make it a joke. A senior moment, he’d called it, and then, drily, that he was rather more senior than most. She hadn’t laughed. Neither had he, really. They had both filed it away in the drawer where they kept the things they weren’t ready to look at, and the drawer had been getting harder to close ever since. “What arithmetic?” she asked, though she already knew, the way you already knew about the soft spot before your foot found it. “How much time we might actually have to solve this,” Silas said quietly, “before there isn’t a me left capable of caring whether it gets solved.” The carriage house went very quiet. Outside, birdsong and the distant, ordinary sound of Marcus’s truck pulling up the drive — the whole ordinary machinery of a life they’d built together, humming along exactly as it should, while underneath it something with a much shorter fuse kept burning down. She thought about the property line — more than she let him see. All summer he’d been getting stronger and the town easier and the studio busier, and every good thing had a shadow attached, because none of it changed the one fact that governed everything: he could not leave. Not the house, not the lawn, not the low stone wall where the property gave over to the road. He had tried, once, early on, and she had watched him reach the boundary and simply stop existing at it, the way water stops at the lip of a glass, and she had promised herself she would never ask him to do it again until they had earned the right. Somewhere in the tangle of what they were trying to prove — a fraud, a false doctor, a name blackened on purpose over a century ago — was the thing that had bound him here. “Then we finish it,” Thea said. She heard her own voice come out steady and was faintly amazed by it. “This season. Not next year, not whenever we get around to it. We use the exhibit Elias keeps talking about, we use everything Vivian gave us, everything Margaret’s found, everything we already have — and we finish it before September fourteenth.” “That’s six weeks.” “That’s the anniversary.” She set the tablet down on the old workbench, because she needed both her hands to be doing something other than shaking. “Elias already suggested it, back before the Hartwell business even wrapped up. A hundred and thirty-one years since—” She stopped, because some sentences she still couldn’t quite finish, even now. She had gotten better at almost everything else. She could say ghost now without her mouth going strange around it, could say dead to his face and mean it as a plain fact instead of a wound. But not this — the difference, she supposed, between knowing the house was haunted and standing in the room where it happened. “Since,” she said again, and let the one word carry it. “It felt too on-the-nose when he first said it. Now it feels like the only date on the calendar that actually matters.” Silas was quiet for a long moment, watching her with an expression she’d learned, over the better part of a year, to read as easily as she read blueprints. There was a whole vocabulary to his face now, one she’d assembled slowly and hoarded — the small line between his brows that meant he was calculating, the way his gaze dropped and steadied when he was about to say something true. “You’re frightened,” he said. “Of what finishing it might cost.” “Constantly.” “And you want to do it anyway.” “Constantly,” she said again, and reached for his hand — an old habit now, easy and automatic, the kind of thing you did without thinking about whether it would work, because most days, lately, it did. His fingers closed around hers, cool and present and real enough, and for a moment neither of them said anything else. It never stopped being a small astonishment. His hand had weight now, or something the mind agreed to call weight — cool as river stone, not quite warm and not quite not, closing around hers with a pressure she could have picked out of a thousand. She could feel what it cost him in the faint tremor of the effort, and that he never once let her see it as a sacrifice — that, more than the wit, more than the century of grief he carried like good posture, was the thing that had undone her in the end. She held on a beat longer than she needed to. So did he. “Six weeks,” Silas said finally. “To finish more than a century of unfinished business.” “When you put it that way it sounds insane.” “Everything about us sounds insane, Thea. I fail to see why this particular insanity should trouble us now.” He managed something close to his usual dry humor, though it didn’t quite reach his eyes. “Very well. Six weeks. Where do we begin?” And there it was — the thing she loved him for and the thing that scared her most, folded into the same breath. He had decided. She could see it settle over him like a coat going on, the straightening, the old professional readiness of a man who had spent his living years turning impossible commissions into standing buildings and had never once, apparently, learned to say a thing couldn’t be done. It should have reassured her. Mostly it did. But she was starting to understand that the bravery and the exhaustion were the same substance, drawn from the same failing well, and that every time he squared his shoulders for her he was spending a little more of the light she was trying to save. She opened her mouth to answer — something about Elias, about the exhibit, about the careful plan she’d been assembling in the margins of her workday for a month. Thea’s phone buzzed in her pocket — Margaret’s name on the screen, which was unusual enough at this hour to make her stomach tighten before she’d even opened the message. Margaret did not text on impulse. Margaret was seventy-one years old, kept the Blackwood family archive in a fireproof cabinet no one else was permitted to touch, and treated the sending of a text message as a small formal occasion, composed in complete sentences with the punctuation squared away. She called when things could wait. She texted only when they couldn’t. Found something, it read. A doctor’s name in the county medical registry from 1893 — not Voss. The real family physician. I think his family might still be local. Call me. Thea read it twice. Then a third time, the words rearranging themselves each pass into something larger. Not Voss. All this time they’d been chasing the doctor who hadn’t existed — the invented name on the fraudulent bill, the phantom Aldous Prescott had conjured to explain a death he had arranged. It had never once occurred to her to go looking for the doctor who had. The real one. The man whose name should have been in the ledger and wasn’t, written out of the story over a century ago so a false one could be written in. She looked up at Silas, who’d gone very still, reading over her shoulder the way he always did. Whatever the lapses had taken from him, they hadn’t taken this — the quickness, the way he arrived at the end of a thing a half-second before she did. He read it, and something moved across his face that she didn’t have a word in his vocabulary for yet. Not hope, exactly. Something older and more careful than hope, the look of a man who had learned not to trust good news and could not, quite, stop himself. Outside, Marcus’s truck door slammed. The lawn mower coughed back to life down the hill. Six weeks, and the light already going long and gold across a lawn Silas Blackwood could not walk to the edge of, and somewhere out there in the town that had built itself so gently around him, a family that might still remember a name that had been stolen along with his. “I think,” Thea said slowly, “we begin with a house call more than a century overdue.”