Time.

That was what all her grandmother’s friends had gently whispered in the drawing room at Everly Manor the day of the service—the first service, fourteen months ago.

Time to heal. Time to grieve. Time to find a way to navigate the new reality of her life, like she wasn’t being pummeled by the waves down the path that turned to black in the winter nights. One. Two. One. Two. With never enough space for breath.

Time was supposed to ease the burden, the heavy weight that had settled somewhere between her shoulders and her gut. Or so all the well-wishers and greeting cards and self-help books had promised.

It had, in a way, Lottie was forced to admit. Because the time had finally come for her to move the last of Peter’s boxes up to the attic. The time had finally come when she could.

Cardboard under her fingers—nothing spectacular about that. Contents smelling of sandalwood and old paper. Peter had been an academic from the moment he was born until the moment he’d shuffled off his mortal coil, and he would be forever entangled with the scent of vellum and snail-shell ink in her memories.

She preferred those memories to the more recent ones, though one could hardly call twelve months and six days recent. It was only that nothing of import had happened since, and so in the grand scheme of important things, they were recent to her.

Rattling. Her therapist, Eliza—whom Lottie had only ever seen through a screen, since Earlsferry wasn’t exactly the bustling metropolis of Edinburgh an hour and a quarter to the south, and because Lottie’s world had grown so much smaller in the last year—had suggested grounding techniques in moments of extreme duress. Feel, scent, sound.

Lottie had no intention of licking the old textbooks in the ‘last box,’ as she’d come to call it in her own mind, and she’d looked inside enough times since packing it up that she could see the contents with her eyes closed. A pair of Peter’s reading glasses, since life lived in dim libraries had spent his sight early on, his familiar pencil case—the one she couldn’t bring herself to open, nor yet to give away—an old paperweight in the shape of the Tower of London, chipped at one corner. It was a strange and unwelcome reminder that a person’s life could, ultimately, be boiled down to the contents of a box.

A box that was now going up into the attic.

Because Lottie couldn’t look at it one more day, couldn’t see that stupid box in the corner of the bedroom she’d shared with Peter for the three years since they’d moved back to Scotland, without wanting to fling that fucking paperweight right through the goddamned window.

I’m moving rooms.

It wasn’t like Everly Manor didn’t have enough space. Grandma Rose had been the eleventh generation to live in the ancestral home, and Lottie’s parents would have been the twelfth if they hadn’t picked up and moved to Massachusetts for her father’s residency when she had been six. Now Lottie was the thirteenth generation, and the only one to have the entire sprawling space to herself. There was absolutely nothing in the world keeping her from moving rooms if she wanted, and nothing keeping her from taking the last box of Peter’s belongings up to the attic.

She picked her favorite pillow and knitted throw off the bed and walked down the hall to the room that sat beside Grandma Rose’s old bedroom. It had been her room once upon a time, back when she and her parents would visit for the summers. The familiar shade of pinkish light cut across the floor from the stained-glass roses on the bay windows that overlooked the garden. Grandma Rose had come from a long line of plant lovers, and Lottie had once believed in fairytales.

The room was empty of furniture, with floors clean from the regular housekeeping service that had ensured her basic survival the last year, but bare. In one corner sat an old wicker bookshelf, bearing perfectly straight rows of the childhood books she’d spent those lazy summers reading.

Lottie walked over to the bay window. As a child, the space had seemed so much larger, but she was grown now, both in the number on her birthday cake and with the weight in her heart. She wasn’t yet thirty—which was like saying that Devil’s Night wasn’t yet Halloween—but she held the hurt of a much older woman in her soul and in the lines drawn from lonely nights crying in an empty house.

Not. Anymore.

She placed the pillow and folded blanket down under the window. She could worry about the bed later, but even the symbolic gesture felt…good. One year was long enough to sit in the dark alone. Perhaps her grandma’s friends had been right when they murmured those unending platitudes about time. Perhaps the time really had come for her to breathe again.

And it all started with moving the last box into the attic.

* * * *

The attic, as it turned out, was not part of the weekly housecleaning schedule. Lottie almost dropped the box when the dust filtering through the late-afternoon light went straight up her nose and caused a dangerously long sneezing fit. But when her eyes cleared, a little brighter for the water leaking at the edges, she saw the dusty attic through a child’s eyes once more. Grandma Rose had brought her up here one summer, back when she could still climb the rickety wooden ladder, and shown her old costume jewelry and the funhouse mirror and swords from some family rebellion or another, and Lottie itched to explore once again. But she had one very important task to finish first.

“Goodbye, Peter,” she whispered, setting the box beside the newer, less dusty ones in the closest corner to the ladder. Grandma Rose, Grandpa Arthur. Peter.

As if on cue, Lottie’s phone rang.

“You scared the shit out of me…”

There were only a few people she could speak to that way, and out of anyone who could be calling, Elodie was the least unwelcome in this dusty afternoon space.

“That’s what happens when you live in an old manor house all alone,” Elodie said. Her voice was slightly muffled, as though the phone was wedged between her shoulder and her ear—a not-uncommon occurrence since the birth of Lottie’s nephew.

“I can’t exactly sell it,” Lottie responded, taking one last look at the box of Peter’s belongings before stepping more deeply into the cavernous space of the attic. “It is ancestral.”

“Your mocking tone conveys your American sensibilities,” Elodie teased. “Everything in Scotland is ancestral to someone.”

“It’s Grandma Rose’s house,” Lottie admitted, walking over to the large steamer chest she had once explored with her grandmother. Bronze buckles caught the late-afternoon light and glinted like the gold rumored to be found off the coast.

“Of course, Lottie,” Elodie responded, her voice immediately contrite. “You know I didn’t mean anything—”

“I know.” Lottie unclasped the latch on the steamer chest. “I brought the last box up to the attic, Ellie,” she said quietly. “I’m actually still in the attic. It’s a very recent development.”

“It’s a very good development,” Elodie said quietly. “You know I loved my brother, but I don’t want to see you waste away to your grief. There’s way too much of your life left to live.”

Lottie had thought that once too, back when she’d been a naïve artist, touring the Prado and the Met. She’d dreamed of painting at the foot of the Eiffel Tower, of filling pages with watercolor and canvases with acrylic. But she’d been dealt a harsh northern wind and the aftereffects of the storm hadn’t let up since, her paints in boxes from a harried move that had changed the trajectory of the life she had once planned out.

“How do I do that, Ellie?” she asked, not really expecting any answer. What could the answer even be? Her parents were back in Massachusetts, utterly uninterested in the house, and selling it would feel like the severing of the last connection she’d shared with her grandmother. But the shadows and hallways reminded her as much of loss as they did of life.

“Maybe you should get away for a while.” Elodie was nothing if not a pragmatist. “Go to London or Athens, or maybe the Highlands before it gets too cold. Just…get some space from the memories.”

“Maybe,” she said quietly. “I could go home for a bit.” Though Everly had always felt more like home than New England, and Grandma Rose always more like family than her polished society parents.

“I don’t think that’s the solution either,” Elodie replied. “Oh shit, don’t eat that…”

“Please go rescue my nephew,” Lottie said, a genuine smile actually tugging at her lips for the first time in what felt like a hundred years. She’d better watch for spinning needles in this ancient manor attic. “I’ll be fine.”

“You’ll be better than fine,” Elodie said. “You just have to let yourself.”

The words were still rattling around in Lottie’s head when she finally pried open the old trunk. On the top was a familiar dressing gown in floral purples and reds. As a little girl, she’d pulled it on and modeled for her grandmother in the mirror, towering on a pair of ancient satin block heels. She’d worn the floppy wool hat as well and the strings of pearls that had to be looped over twice.

For a few minutes, Lottie simply played, like a child, tugging on the old elbow-length gloves and sliding the rhinestone rings atop them. She opened an ancient paper fan and pretended to pour tea into the chipped china cup she found nestled between scarves. And at the bottom of it all, she found a stack of papers, letters and photographs.

The Daring Dominic and the House of Damocles.

The paper was yellowed and uneven at the edges, curling from the humidity of the seaside. On the front cover of what had to be an old festival program was an illustration of a man performing a wild acrobatic stunt—the Daring Dominic, no doubt.

Lottie lifted the corner and her finger singed, as if burned on a hot stove. She pulled back, awareness rioting through her body, the hairs on the back of her neck standing on end. Surely there was a storm on the horizon. It had been cool and sunny that morning, but a buzz of electricity from coming lightning was the surest explanation for why this program, not the other letters, had left her feeling alive?

When she did turn the page, there was no second spark, but what she found inside made her heart stop, nonetheless. It was a photograph, black and white and slightly fuzzy, like the people in the image were moving faster than the machinery could keep up with, and right in the middle, Grandma Rose.

Lottie looked like her grandma. She’d known that since the very first day she’d visited Everly Manor. Everyone said as much, and Everly had always been host to photographs and pictures. Not that she’d needed them. Even with decades of life between them, she’d seen her grandmother every time she looked in the mirror. Bouncing, wild curls, blonde and long on her, white and short on her grandmother, full lips, high cheeks that always ran red in the summer sunshine.

But this photo, this photo showed Rose even younger than Lottie was now, and even in the black and white, the resemblance between them was uncanny, a version of herself from decades ago.

It took a moment of wading through her feelings about seeing her grandmother so young and vibrant before Lottie looked at the others in the pictures. There were four of them, two on each side of her grandmother, outlined by the edges of a large canvas tent.

The Daring Dominic, given his likeness to the illustration, stood on Rose’s one side, tall and muscled, the contours of his abdomen and thick thighs straining his acrobatic suit. A single dark curl spilled over his forehead and a dark mustache curled at the edges, highlighting the strong lines of his face.

Beside him was a man made for adventure, a loose, billowing shirt tucked in at the waist, over a pair of tight leggings. His hair was long and somehow looked windswept, and Lottie felt a strange urge in the pit of her stomach.

Desire.

Surely not. Surely her first surge of womanly need after a year of grief and heartbreak was not for a stranger in a black-and-white photograph, one who was most likely dead and buried, if not at least as old as her grandfather would have been.

Surges of desire.

Because the Daring Dominic himself was nothing less than an outstanding specimen of a man and the other three men in the photograph, were…

Hot.

It was so weird, so fucking weird to think that these men, who absolutely had to be well into their dotage now, were hot. It felt perverted and creepy and altogether unwelcome, especially given the anachronism of calling men in an old photo hot, but there genuinely was no other word for them.

On her grandmother’s one side was a beautiful man, loose dark curls spilling over his deep brown skin, across one shoulder and halfway down his bare chest. And all the way at the end, a man with youthful exuberance, a wide-split smile and the joy of life on his handsome face.

The House of Damocles.

What sword was about to fall on these beautiful acrobats, and how had her grandmother found them?

“What happened to the House of Damocles?” Lottie murmured to herself. “Where are you now, Daring Dominic?”

She pulled out her phone, feeling all the while foolish and entirely unable to stop herself. It was a harmless search, nothing more or less than curiosity that had her fingers flying over the screen of her phone. Totally, completely harmless. What could she even do with the information if she found it?

The House of Damocles joins the Highland Renaissance Faire for a Halloween Spectacular.

Her thumb hovered. Her breath caught. Her eyes burned, but she couldn’t blink.

The House of Damocles was still performing. And it was coming to Scotland.

This week.