The Blackwood Bargain
The rain began at the precise moment the solicitor's door closed behind her. A thin, determined drizzle that darkened the shoulders of Elara Vance's coat and slicked the cobblestones of the village high street to a mirror of grey sky. She stood for a moment in the narrow shelter of the doorway, watching the water bead on the brass nameplate, and tried to remember how to breathe. Inside her pocket, the letter from her grandmother weighed almost nothing and yet pressed against her hip like a stone. The name on the will burned in her memory, a brand she could not rub away. Declan Blackwood. The drizzle had become a downpour by the time she reached the Land Rover, parked crookedly outside the post office. She slid behind the wheel and sat, hands on the cold plastic, watching the windscreen fog. The village of Thornfield was quiet at this hour, its shop fronts dark, its pavements empty. Through the rain, the church spire rose like a needle against the low sky. She had been christened in that church. Her grandmother had been buried from it three weeks ago.
