Chapter 72
“She believes she did,” Lurick replied, steady.
No qualifiers.
No attempt to soften the claim or explain it away.
He wasn’t agreeing with her.
But he wasn’t dismissing her either.
And that, apparently, was enough to irritate Seth further.
Seth let out a slow breath, the kind that came with restraint.
His jaw flexed once before he spoke again.
“And I believe in property law,” he said, tone cooling by degrees.
“Which means one of us is going to be useful in court.”
He didn’t raise his voice.
He didn’t need to.
The implication landed cleanly, like a gavel strike, firm, final, and unapologetically pragmatic.
They stopped at the edge of the stone steps, just before the long, tree-lined driveway that stretched out like a ribbon of gray toward the gate.
The morning light had settled into something steady now, not warm, but clear, unforgiving in the way it revealed every crack in the path, every weed between stones.
Behind them, the castle loomed, silent and immovable.
Its high windows stared out across the grounds like watchful, indifferent eyes, unblinking, unreadable.
The towers rose into the pale sky without grandeur, just presence, as though the building had long since tired of drama and now simply endured.
The stone walls, weathered and moss-darkened, held a quiet that didn’t feel passive.
It was the kind of silence that seemed to choose its moments, holding breath when it mattered, saying nothing when everything hung in the balance.
It gave the sense that the castle didn’t care who ruled it, or who came and went.
As long as someone paid the bills and patched the roof, it would stand.
Lurick turned his head, gaze drifting back to the façade.
He studied it not with awe, but with a kind of worn familiarity, as if he’d spent enough time inside its halls to understand the weight of its history without romanticizing it.
“I don’t think she’s lying,” he said, finally.
His voice was quiet, but there was no hesitation in it.
It was a conclusion, not a theory.
And it had taken time to arrive there.
Seth didn’t look at him.
He kept his eyes on the gravel at his feet, one hand resting lightly on his hip, fingers tapping once against his belt in a slow, thoughtful rhythm.
“Of course she’s not lying,” he said, almost under his breath.
“That’s what makes it messier.”
His tone had no triumph in it.
No relief.
Just the grim understanding of a man who knew that truth, when tangled with delusion, was the hardest thing to untangle in front of a judge.
Seth crossed his arms slowly, the fabric of his blazer pulling taut across his shoulders.
His stance shifted, one foot angling outward as if bracing himself, not for an argument, but for the slow, grinding weight of inevitability.
He looked like a man settling into an uncomfortable truth rather than resisting it.
“She’s not scamming anyone,” he said, voice low and level, but with an undercurrent of something colder, fatigue, maybe, or frustration carefully contained.
“She’s not playing games. She’s not chasing money or sympathy.”
He paused, glancing toward the line of trees beyond the drive, as if the sheer absurdity of the situation might make more sense if viewed from another angle.
“She’s rewritten her own past,” he continued.
And this time, his voice sounded different, less clipped, more resigned.
“That’s harder to fix. You can’t reason someone out of a world they truly believe they live in.”
Lurick was quiet for a moment, then spoke softly, but with purpose.
“Then the question is why,” he said, watching Seth closely now.
“If she’s not faking it, if she believes all of it, what made her need to?”
Seth didn’t answer right away.
Instead, he stared down the drive, his jaw working slightly, like he was biting down on the impulse to argue the point.
“Not your job to answer that,” he said at last, tone clipped again, emotion pulled tightly under control.
“That’s for Dr. Blythe to figure out. That’s what the specialists are for.”
He turned just enough to look at Lurick directly, eyes sharp beneath the furrow of his brow.
“Your job,” he said, voice growing firmer, colder, “is to keep her stable enough that we don’t land in court purgatory while everyone else plays diagnosis-by-committee.”
His gaze didn’t waver.
“Because until we get legal clarity, until someone with the right authority signs the right form—Lui can’t touch a single brick.”
Each word landed like a line in a contract, clear, nonnegotiable.
And beneath it all was the unspoken warning: don’t get sentimental. Don’t get involved.
The law didn’t care who Henriette thought she was.
Only who the paperwork said she’d been.
“I’ll do what I can,” Lurick said, though he knew the words sounded thinner than he meant them to.
It wasn’t a promise.
It wasn’t even reassurance.
It was what people said when there wasn’t a right answer, only pressure and time closing in from both sides.