The Inheritance
The letter arrived on a Tuesday, as most life-changing correspondence tends to do. Margaret Ashworth stood at her kitchen window, watching the postman retreat down the gravel path, unaware that the envelope in her hands contained the key to everything she had spent decades trying to forget.
The estate was called Thornwood, and it had been in the Ashworth family for six generations. Margaret had not set foot there since she was seventeen, the summer her sister disappeared into the midnight garden and never returned.
"You've inherited the whole thing," her solicitor explained over the phone, his voice carrying that particular blend of professional sympathy and barely concealed curiosity. "The house, the grounds, everything. Your aunt was quite specific in her wishes."
Margaret had not known her aunt was still alive. In the Ashworth family, there were many things left unsaid, conversations that dead-ended into silence, photographs with faces carefully cut away.
She drove to Thornwood on a gray October morning, the kind of day that seemed to exist outside of time. The house emerged from the mist like a memory refusing to fade, its Victorian towers reaching toward a sky the color of old bones.
The garden was exactly as she remembered it.