“You make good coffee.”
“Would you like more?”
“I wouldn’t say no. This is a lot to take in,” he said when she went into the kitchen. “And it may seem like a lot of history you don’t need to know.”
“I don’t know any of the history, so I need to know.”
“Collin and I grew up in Poole’s Bay together. He was best man at my wedding—thirty-three years ago this spring. And I stood up for him at his.”
“You married young.”
He laughed. “Not so very young, but when you know, you know.”
“I suppose.”
“Thank you,” he said when she brought him another coffee. “Collin didn’t have much interest in his family’s history, but he loved the manor. I can’t tell you how often the two of us—or a gang of us—snuck into it when we were boys. It’s quite haunted.”
“Naturally.”
At her amused tone, he looked down into his coffee. “Well. In any case, it’s a storied history, but his interest was art. Like your father. Like you.”
“He was an artist?”
“That was his calling, his passion. Though he was pushed into the mold of the family business. Shipping, shipbuilding. Poole’s Bay is named for the first Poole who began building wooden ships, who started a mill, who founded Poole’s Bay and built the original portion of the manor, in 1794.”
As if catching himself, Oliver held up his hands.
“A storied history, as I said, which I hope you might find some interest in.”
“He never knew any of this, my father. He never knew he had a brother, a twin.”
“No, and I’m sorry for it. I want to assure you, Collin was a good man, a good friend, and if he’d had the opportunity, I have no doubt he’d have been a good brother. He’d have been a good husband and father.”
“You said you stood up for him at his wedding.”
“I did, some five years after he did the same for me.”
“Did he have children?”
“No. Tragically, Johanna died on their wedding day.”
“That’s—” It closed her throat, clutched at her heart. “That’s horrible.”
“It was. She fell, coming down the stairs during the reception. There was nothing anyone could do. Collin was never quite the same. He rarely left the manor. He grieved, Ms. MacTavish, deeply.”
“Sonya,” she murmured. “I can’t imagine how awful it had to be for him.”
“He spent the rest of his life mourning her, largely closed off from the world. I was allowed in, and my family, as they’d become his family. But he cut himself off from his own. As for the business, the work of it was left primarily to cousins, though his grandmother kept her hand in until the day she died. As his lawyer, I handled his financial interests in the business, and as a Poole, he retained that financial interest, but he spent his days painting and maintaining the manor he and Johanna loved. The home they’d planned to spend their lives in together.
“The home,” Oliver continued, “and all it contains, he left to you.”
Chapter Four
Shock was too mild a word.
“I’m sorry, what? That’s crazy. He didn’t even know me.”
“You’re his brother’s only child.”
“But—you said cousins took over the family business. It doesn’t make sense for him to leave a house to a stranger.”
“You weren’t a stranger to him. You’re family. And while he was a reclusive man for the last decades of his life, he had an interest in you, your career. He admired your work.”
“My … work.”
Oliver gave her that slow, easy smile.
“The manor has excellent Wi-Fi—Collin saw to that. Reclusive didn’t mean ignoring technology or modernization. As I said, when he learned about your father, his brother, his twin, through my research into his genealogy, he had every intention of contacting him. Then another tragedy, another death. He mourned your father, too, Sonya, though they’d been separated only days after sharing a womb.
“You’re what’s left of his brother, and the only direct descendant of their biological father.”
For the first time in her life, she fully understood the concept of head-spinning. “Listen, I’m going to appreciate the sentiment, even the cinematic weirdness of the inheritance from a long-lost uncle.”
Oliver let out a laugh at that. “He would have liked you. I think you would have liked him.”