Chapter 17 17

Chapter 17 17
Chapter Seventeen

I didn't sleep.

I tried. I lay in the dark with Ashes curled against my side and stared at the ceiling and watched the hours change on the clock on the kitchen shelf. Two. Three. Four fifteen.

My mother had been alive.

I kept turning it over, looking at it from different angles, trying to find the side of it that made sense. Three years. She had been alive for at least three years after I was born, which meant she had held me, probably. Fed me, maybe. Looked at my face and known I was hers.

And then she had gone. Or been made to go.

I thought about my father's voice on the phone. That unfamiliar frailty. Whether it was real or whether he had spent the last year in a prison cell rehearsing exactly how to sound when he called me.

I thought about Frederick standing in my kitchen telling me he hadn't been ready to lose me yet.

I thought about that for longer than I should have.

By five I gave up on sleep entirely and sat at the kitchen table with a cup of tea and my own thoughts for company, which was not the most comfortable arrangement.

\---

He knocked at seven.

I knew it was him before I reached the door. I don't know how. Some particular quality in the knock, or maybe just the fact that my life had recently developed a habit of putting him exactly where I least expected.

I opened the door.

He was holding a paper bag from the bakery down the street and he looked like he hadn't slept either. There was something almost human about that. Frederick Lancaster, undone slightly at the edges by a sleepless night.

"I'm not apologising for what I told you," he said, before I could speak. "But I am sorry for the timing of it."

I stepped back and let him in.

He put the bag on the kitchen table and sat down without being asked, like he'd been sitting at that table for years. I sat across from him and pulled the bag toward me and looked inside. Two pastries. Plain ones, nothing acidic, nothing that would set my stomach off.

He'd remembered.

I looked at him across the table and felt something move in my chest that I immediately tried to put back where it came from.

"I want to see the second death certificate," I said.

"I thought you would." He reached into his jacket and put a folded document on the table between us.

I opened it slowly.

The paper was a copy, slightly grainy, clearly scanned from a physical document. But the details were legible. The name. The date. A date that fell three years and four months after my birthday.

Her cause of death was listed as cardiac failure.

She had died in a town I had never heard of, two hundred miles from the city where I grew up. Two hundred miles from the house where my father had told me, over and over, in the gentle and practiced way he had, that she never made it home from the hospital.

I stared at the document for a long time.

"The town," I said. "Did your investigators look into it?"

"They did." He leaned forward slightly. "She was living there under a different name. Small house, rented. No connections to anyone from her previous life that we could find." He paused. "Except one."

I looked up.

"There was a neighbour. An older woman who remembered her. Said she was quiet, kept to herself, seemed frightened of something she never named." He held my gaze. "She also said your mother had a photograph. On the mantelpiece. A baby."

My throat closed.

"The neighbour assumed it was a niece or a nephew," Frederick said quietly. "Your mother never told her otherwise."

I pressed my fingers to my mouth and looked at the document again. At her name. Eleanor Darclen, the name she'd been born with, not the assumed one she'd lived under at the end.

She had kept my photograph.

I was not going to cry in front of him. I had decided that before he arrived and I was going to hold to it.

"Charlotte." His voice was very low.

"I'm fine."

"You don't have to—"

"I said I'm fine, Frederick." I folded the document carefully and held it in both hands and breathed. "What else?"

He hesitated. Just briefly. "The house she was renting. It was paid for. Consistently, for three years, through a private account that traces back to a shell company." He stopped.

"My father's," I said.

"Yes."

So he had moved her. Hidden her, paid for her silence, kept her alive and contained and two hundred miles away while telling his daughter she was dead. And the question that followed that, the one I hadn't wanted to look at directly since Frederick had first told me this morning, was sitting right in front of me now and I couldn't avoid it any longer.

"Why?" I said. "Why keep her alive at all? Why not just—" I stopped.

"We don't know yet," he said. "But I think it has something to do with money. Her family had significant assets that transferred conditionally on her survival. If she was declared dead prematurely it would have triggered an investigation." He paused. "Your father is many things but he's not careless."

"So he kept her alive for the inheritance," I said flatly. "And when the money had transferred he let her die in a town nobody would look in."

Frederick said nothing. He didn't need to.

I stood up and went to the window. The rooftops again. That grey honest sky.

I felt him come to stand behind me. Not touching. Just close. Close enough that I could feel the warmth of him at my back, steady and certain, like standing near something solid when the ground under you is unreliable.

"I don't know who I am," I said quietly. "I built everything I knew about myself on a story that wasn't true."

"That's not right," he said, just as quietly. "You're the woman who stood on that driveway with nothing and kept her chin up. You're the woman who worked a job she hated and took in a stray cat and got back up every single time." A pause. "That's got nothing to do with your father's lies."

I turned around.

He was closer than I'd realised. Close enough that I had to look up slightly to meet his eyes. Close enough to see the tiredness in them and underneath the tiredness something else, something that had been there for weeks, careful and restrained and very much present.

My heart was doing something I didn't have the vocabulary for.

"You don't get to say things like that to me," I said softly.

"I know," he said. He didn't move back.

Neither did I.

For one long moment we stood like that, the morning light between us getting thinner, and I was acutely aware of everything. The warmth of him. The steadiness. The particular way he was looking at me like I was the only thing in the room worth looking at.

Then my phone rang and we both took a step back and the moment dissolved like it had never existed.

I looked at the screen.

A local number. Not my father this time.

I answered it.

"Is this Charlotte Darclen?" A woman's voice. Professional, clipped.

"It is."

"My name is Patricia Howe. I'm a solicitor." A brief pause. "I've been trying to reach you for some time. I represent the estate of Eleanor Darclen." Another pause. "Your mother, Ms. Darclen, left a will. And you are the sole beneficiary."

I looked at Frederick across the small kitchen.

He looked back at me.

And the ground shifted again, in a way that had nothing to do with him this time.

My mother had known exactly where I was.

She had been watching from two hundred miles away.

And she had made sure that when the time came, I would be taken care of.