Chapter 19

Charlotte's POV

Chapter Nineteen

Patricia Howe's office was on the fourth floor of a building that smelled like old carpet and printer ink.

I sat across from her desk with my hands in my lap and listened to her explain things in the careful measured way solicitors have, like they're aware that the words they're using are landing on a person and they've learned to pace them accordingly.

The estate was considerable.

Not enormous. Not the kind of wealth I had grown up with, the showy kind, the kind that announced itself in marble floors and gated driveways. This was quieter than that. A modest property in the town where my mother had died. A savings account that had been building interest for twenty six years. A collection of jewellery that had belonged to my grandmother. And a separate investment account, small but steady, that Eleanor had been adding to consistently from the moment it was opened.

From the month I was born.

I sat with that for a moment.

She had opened an account the month I was born and put money into it every month for three years without missing once. And then the deposits had stopped, which was when she died, but the interest had kept growing quietly in the background for over two decades like something patient waiting to be found.

"The total value," Patricia said, sliding a document across the desk, "sits at just over three hundred and eighty thousand."

I looked at the number on the page.

"She built this herself?" I said.

"Entirely. Nothing in this estate connects to your father's assets or his company in any form. It's clean." Patricia held my gaze. "Your mother was very deliberate about that. She was very deliberate about a great many things."

"What do you mean?"

Patricia folded her hands on the desk. "Ms. Darclen, your mother first contacted my firm fourteen months before she died. She was thorough. She had clearly been planning this for some time." A pause. "She also left you something else."

She opened the drawer beside her and took out an envelope and placed it on top of the document.

My name was on the front.

Not Charlotte Darclen. Not the name my father gave me.

Charlie.

The name nobody had called me since I was small. A name I hadn't thought about in years, hadn't even remembered until I saw it written there in handwriting I had never seen before and somehow recognised anyway.

My hands were not entirely steady when I picked it up.

"Take all the time you need," Patricia said, and stood and left the room quietly.

I sat alone in the office with the envelope in my hands and the number on the document in front of me and the smell of old carpet around me and I thought about a woman in a small house two hundred miles away putting money aside every month for a daughter she wasn't allowed to know.

I opened the envelope.

The letter was three pages. Handwritten, small and neat, the kind of handwriting that belongs to someone who learned it carefully.

I won't put down everything she said. Some of it is mine to keep.

But the parts I can say are these.

She knew about me the whole time. She had found ways to know, small careful ways that left no trail my father could follow. A friend of a friend. A photograph obtained through someone she trusted. She knew my birthday each year and she knew when I started school and she knew, somehow, about the accident I had when I was seven when I fell out of the oak tree in the back garden and broke my arm.

She had been watching from the edges of my life for as long as she could.

My father had taken her away when I was three. Not violently. He wasn't that kind of man, he was the other kind, the kind that uses money and lawyers and the quiet pressure of consequence. He had found something, she wrote, some piece of information she couldn't defend against, and he had used it to remove her cleanly and completely and install the story of her death in her place.

She didn't tell me what the information was.

But she told me to ask Frederick Lancaster.

I stopped reading.

I read that line again.

Ask Frederick Lancaster. He knows what your father held over me. He found it during his investigation and I believe, though I cannot be certain, that he chose not to use it. I don't know his reasons. But he has it, Charlie. Make him show you.

I sat in that office for a long time after I finished the letter.

Then I folded it carefully along its creases and put it back in the envelope and put the envelope in my bag and thanked Patricia Howe and walked out into the street.

The cold hit me immediately.

I stood on the pavement with my bag against my side and the city moving around me and thought about Frederick in my kitchen this morning. The document he'd brought. The things he'd told me. The things, I now understood, he hadn't.

He knew what my father had held over my mother.

He had known and he had said nothing.

I thought about the will, and the solicitor's call, and Frederick standing close behind me at the window with that careful restrained look on his face.

I thought about the apartment on Calloway Street and the too generous tip and the note on the napkin and the coffee from the bakery this morning.

I thought about all the small careful things he had been doing and I looked at them now from a different angle, in a different light, and they looked different than they had before.

Not wrong necessarily.

Just not entirely what I had thought.

I took out my phone.

I found his number.

I typed four words, the same number he had used on the napkin, because it felt appropriate.

We need to talk.

I pressed send and stood on the pavement and waited.

His reply came in less than a minute.

I know.

And underneath that, two seconds later.

I've been waiting for you to find out.