Which meant trudging up the stairs he’d spent days building. Walking into the picturesque atmosphere Indi had created with all her decorations and suggestions. An atmosphere made all the more exquisite by memories of time spent with Sydney here.

He paused at the top of the stairs. He’d made a horrible mistake keeping this a secret from Maggie.

But that wasn’t the only thing rooting him in place at the landing outside the treehouse door. It was something else. A feeling—not a good one. Why was the door cracked open? He remembered closing it before he’d left with Sydney more than an hour ago.

He pushed it the rest of the way open and stepped inside, shock surging through him. Someone had been here. In the time between when he’d walked Sydney to the house and returned with Maggie, someone had . . . searched the place? The mattress was at an angle on the box spring, its covers mussed. The drawer of the little bedside table was open, and faint, dusty footprints led to the bistro table.

Someone had been here and hadn’t even tried to hide it. You need to call someone. Wilder, he should call Wilder. Or the police. Or—

A sharp cry immobilized him. Until realization pushed him out the door once more.

“Neil.” His name was a moan on Maggie’s lips. His focus flew to the ground. Why was Maggie panting, bending?

He rushed down the steps, reaching her just as her legs gave out. “Maggie, what’s happening?” He caught her crumpling form.

“I remember . . . I remem—”

The word died on her lips as her eyes fluttered closed.

Neil couldn’t make himself move. He just stood there in the doorway of Maggie’s hospital room, the jagged edges of too many emotions pressing against him all at once.

But the sharpest, the loudest—nearly drowning out the beeping of a monitor, the noise of a mop bucket’s wheels as a janitor pushed it down the corridor behind him—fear.

Lilian was already at the bedside, enfolding Maggie’s limp hand in her own, murmuring words of love or maybe a prayer. She was the strong one. She hadn’t stopped cold in the door like he did, frozen by the sight of Maggie with her eyes closed, cheeks ashen, a tube in her nose, and hooked to machines.

No, the moment the doctor had strode into the waiting room ten minutes ago and asked for the Muir family, Lilian had been the one to jump to her feet, to surely catch every detail that passed his lips—blocked vessels, emergency angioplasty, stent. Lilian had filed every detail, he knew, so that she could fill in Indi and probably research each medical term the moment she got the chance.

Whereas he’d tripped on the doctor’s first words. Muir family.

“This is Muir Farm. It’ll always be Muir land.”

Oh, Maggie. Had he done this to her? The long walk across the fields. The cold, evening air. The shock of what he’d shown her. The panic that had set in—a reaction he still didn’t understand. But that didn’t matter now.