Chapter 15 Chapter 15

Chapter 15 Chapter 15

Chapter Fifteen

I locked my door.

I don't know why that bothered me as much as it did. It was a sensible thing to do. I was a woman living alone on a third floor with a lock that the landlord had admitted, somewhat casually during the handover, was due to be replaced. Locking the door was just practical.

But I did it thinking about his handwriting on that napkin. The four words. The particular way he'd written them, like it wasn't a suggestion.

I lay in the dark listening to the city outside and told myself the heat I felt had nothing to do with Frederick Lancaster.

I almost convinced myself.

\---

I was on my second coffee the next morning when someone knocked.

Three knocks. Deliberate. I knew before I got to the door.

I opened it and he was standing in the hallway in a dark coat with two paper cups from the place on the corner and an expression that gave nothing away.

"You didn't have to—" I started.

"I was passing."

"You weren't passing. I'm on the third floor."

He held out one of the cups. I took it because I wanted the coffee, not because I wanted him standing in my doorway looking like that at eight in the morning.

"How did you know my flat number?" I asked.

"It was on the lease."

I leaned against the doorframe and looked at him. He looked back. Ashes appeared between my ankles and regarded Frederick with the suspicious energy of someone who had not forgotten being carried like a radioactive object.

"You should come in," I said, and immediately wondered why I'd said it.

He came in.

He stood in the middle of the main room and looked around the way people do when they're trying to understand how you live. The books on the windowsill. The medication on the kitchen shelf. The blanket folded over the arm of the small sofa. His eyes moved over everything quietly, not intrusively, but I felt it anyway.

"It suits you," he said.

"It's small."

"That's not what I meant."

I sat on the sofa and wrapped both hands around the coffee cup and watched him look out the window at the rooftops. He had his back to me and his shoulders were carrying something heavy, I could see it in the set of them, that particular tension I had once known how to read from across a room.

"Why are you here, Frederick?" I said. Not unkindly. Just honestly.

He turned around. He looked at me for a moment like he was deciding something.

"There's something I need to tell you," he said. "And I wanted to tell you myself before you heard it elsewhere."

Something tightened in my chest.

"Tell me."

He sat down in the chair across from me. Leaned forward with his elbows on his knees, the coffee cup hanging from his fingers.

"Your father is being released," he said.

The room went very quiet.

"What?"

"Early release. Medical grounds." His voice was careful. "His legal team pushed for it. Apparently his health has deteriorated significantly in the last two months. The application was approved three days ago."

I stared at him.

"Three days ago," I repeated.

"I found out last night. I wanted to be certain before I told you."

I stood up. Not because I had anywhere to go, just because sitting suddenly felt impossible. I went to the window and stood where he had been standing and looked out at the rooftops and tried to organise the feeling moving through me into something coherent.

My father. Out. Walking around in the same city. In the same air.

"How long?" I said.

"He's out Monday."

Four days.

I pressed my fingers to my mouth and looked at the sky above the rooftops, that flat grey morning sky.

"Charlotte."

"I'm fine."

"You don't have to be fine."

"I know I don't have to be." I turned around. "I'm choosing to be. There's a difference."

He was watching me with that quiet intensity that I had been trying all week not to look at directly, the way you don't look directly at something too bright.

"He can't touch you," Frederick said. "Whatever he tries, whatever his legal team attempts with that property motion or anything else, he cannot touch you. I'll make sure of it."

"You can't promise that."

"I'm promising it."

"Frederick—"

"I'm promising it, Charlotte."

His voice was low and completely certain and it landed somewhere in the middle of my chest and stayed there, warm and inconvenient.

I looked at him sitting in my small chair in my small apartment in the morning light, this man who had dismantled my entire life with precision and care and was now sitting here promising to protect what was left of it, and I felt something move through me that I really didn't want to feel.

Not forgiveness. It wasn't that.

Something smaller. Something that lived just underneath anger, in the place where anger goes when it's been burning for too long and starts to run out of fuel.

I sat back down on the sofa.

We were closer now than we'd been a moment ago. Close enough that I could see the shadows under his eyes properly, the ones that said he hadn't been sleeping. Close enough that when he reached over and moved a strand of hair from my face, slowly, like he was asking permission with the gesture itself, I didn't move away.

I should have moved away.

His fingers barely grazed my cheek and he pulled his hand back and looked at me like he was trying to memorise something.

"I'll figure it out," I said quietly.

"I know you will." His voice was rougher than it had been. "You always do."

We sat like that for a moment, the morning light between us, Ashes purring somewhere behind the sofa, the city going about its business outside the window.

Then my phone rang.

I looked at the screen.

Unknown number. Local area code.

Something told me to answer it.

"Hello?"

Silence for a moment. Then breathing. Then a voice I hadn't heard in over a year, rougher now, slower, but unmistakable.

"Charlotte." A pause. "It's your father."

I looked up and met Frederick's eyes across the small room.

And whatever had been softening in me in the last ten minutes went completely still.