My husband had spent years warning me never to set foot on that farm. So after he passed away and the lawyer handed me the key, saying that from now on the place belonged to me, I was ready to sell it right away and put everything behind me. But before making my final decision, I still wanted to see it once for myself. When the door opened, I finally understood why, all those years, he had never wanted me to set foot there.

“You all need to leave.”

Silence.

Jenna stared at me. “You’re serious?”

“Yes.”

“Even me?”

I held her gaze. “You are always welcome here. They are not.”

That landed where I meant it to, not as rejection, but as a line.

Jenna’s face changed. Not much. Just enough for me to see the war inside her. Loyalty, anger, humiliation, hunger for explanation, the ache of her father still fresh enough to make any thread to him feel valuable.

“I think I’ll go with them,” she said finally. “For now.”

She kissed my cheek quickly. The gesture was so automatic, so little-girl familiar, that it hurt worse than the words.

“Think about the offer,” she said.

Then she turned and left with them.

I watched from the window as the SUV pulled away with my daughter in the silver sedan behind it, and for the first time since arriving in Alberta, I felt genuinely afraid.

Not of losing the farm.

Of losing Jenna to the story they would tell her next.

Ellis waited until the vehicles disappeared beyond the gate before speaking.

“There’s something you should know,” he said.

I turned. “About the brothers?”

“About the property. And about your husband.”

He hesitated in a way that made clear he did not hesitate often.

“Mr. Mitchell asked me not to mention it unless things became necessary.”

A strange laugh caught in my throat. “I’m beginning to suspect my husband prepared for necessity more thoroughly than most people prepare for retirement.”

Ellis gave the faintest shadow of a smile. “That sounds about right.”

He led me not to the house or office or stables, but beyond them, toward an old weathered barn I had noticed only in passing. Unlike the rest of the property, it had been left mostly unrestored. Gray boards. Sagging roofline. Rusted hardware. The kind of structure a person’s eye skipped once it had seen the polished version of everything else.

Inside, hay bales and old tools sat in carefully believable disorder. Ellis moved to the far corner and pulled aside several stacked bales. Beneath them lay a trapdoor flush with the floor.

I stared at it.

“He had this built last winter,” Ellis said. “Workers thought it was a root cellar.”

He lifted the door.

A staircase descended into darkness.

“After you, Mrs. Mitchell.”