Chapter 2 - The Scent of Old Pine
The grandfather clock in the barn entryway struck eleven, its brass pendulum ticking with agonizing clarity into the stillness.
Three hundred thousand dollars.
The number didn't just hang in the air; it suffocated me.
At twenty-three, I had been working as a junior architectural draftsman for my father's commercial contracting firm in downtown Asheville. I had met Julian Vance—a brilliant, quiet structural engineer who had been hired to inspect the load-bearing trusses on the Blue Ridge Medical Pavilion project.
Julian had been gentle. He had listened when I spoke about historical preservation, bought me black coffee from the street cart outside the municipal building, and looked at me as though I were a whole person rather than an auxiliary piece of the Holloway dynasty.
When I found out I was pregnant, Julian had held my hands in the parking lot of the French Broad River park and cried tears of pure, unvarnished relief. He had told me he was going to buy the craftsman cottage outside Black Mountain. He had told me he was speaking to my father that very evening to ask for my hand.
The next morning, Julian was gone.
His apartment was cleaned out. His phone was disconnected.
When I ran into my father's office in tears, Gordon had looked at me over the rims of his reading glasses and said: “He was a drifter, Marie. The second he found out you were carrying, he took his tools and ran. I told you that men from outside the county don't stick around when real responsibility shows up.”
For five years, that had been the foundation of my life.
I had believed that the father of my child was a coward who had abandoned us for the open road. I had swallowed my mother's daily insults, accepted my sister Lianne's cruel jokes about my "lack of discernment," and spent every waking hour working double shifts to prove to my family that I could raise Bennett without being an embarrassment to their name.
I looked at Callum.
"Callum..." My voice came out as a broken rasp, my fingers tangling into the silk lace of my veil. "What did you say?"
Callum turned to me. The iron in his face softened instantly, his gray eyes swimming with an ocean of fierce, protective tenderness. He reached out with his right hand, his warm, calloused fingers gently wrapping around mine where I held Bennett’s shoulder.
"Julian Vance didn't run away from you, Marie," Callum whispered, loud enough for every guest in the front three rows to hear.
"Julian Vance was blackmailed."
My mother lunged forward, her silk purse swinging wildly, her manicured fingers clawing at the sleeve of my father's tuxedo. "Gordon, make him stop! Cut the microphone! Tell the ushers to escort this man off the property! He is fabricating slander to humiliate us on our daughter's wedding day!"
"Julian Vance was my first cousin, Eleanor," Callum said, not looking at her, keeping his gaze locked on my father.
A collective, stunned gasp rippled across the seventy-four guests sitting in the wooden pews.
My sister Lianne, sitting in the second row in her blush-pink maid-of-honor dress, stood up halfway, her hand flying to her mouth, her eyes bulging in sudden, disoriented horror.
"Julian was your cousin?" I breathed, staring at the man I had loved for two years.
"Julian was the reason I took the regional logistics contract in North Carolina three years ago, Marie," Callum said softly, his thumb brushing my knuckles.
"Two months before Julian died of leukemia in a hospice clinic in Seattle last year, he called me.
He gave me his private journals.
He gave me the bank routing numbers.
May you like
And he told me... that Gordon Holloway had threatened to destroy his professional engineering license, fabricate a criminal audit on his firm, and ruin his elderly mother’s pension...
unless he signed a non-disclosure agreement, took three hundred thousand dollars from the Holloway corporate escrow account, and surrendered all parental rights to his unborn child."
