Chapter 20

Charlotte's POV

Chapter Twenty

He was already home when I got there.

I hadn't planned to go to the house. I had stood on that pavement and told myself I would do this somewhere neutral, somewhere public, a café or a park, somewhere with other people and background noise and easy exits.

But my feet had made their own decision and twenty minutes later I was standing at his front door with my mother's letter in my bag and four pages of questions I didn't know how to ask.

Mrs. Albrecht opened the door before I knocked.

She looked at my face and stepped back without a word.

He was in the study at the back of the house. I hadn't been in that room before. It was darker than the rest of the house, floor to ceiling shelves on two walls, a desk that had clearly been used hard for years, papers stacked with the organised chaos of someone who knew exactly where everything was and didn't care how it looked to anyone else.

He was standing at the window when I came in. He turned around.

He looked like a man who had been rehearsing something and had just decided in the last second to abandon the rehearsal.

Good, I thought. We could do without the rehearsal.

I closed the door behind me and stood in the middle of the room and looked at him.

"My mother's letter," I said. "She told me to ask you something."

He nodded once. Like he'd known this was coming. Like he'd been standing at that window waiting for exactly this.

"She said you found something during your investigation. Something my father used against her. Something that made her leave." I held his gaze. "She said you chose not to use it and she didn't know why." I paused. "I'd like to know why."

He was quiet for a moment.

Then he moved away from the window and sat on the edge of the desk, not behind it, just on the edge of it, and looked at the floor briefly before looking back at me.

"Your mother had a son," he said.

The room went very still.

"Before you," he continued, his voice careful and even. "Before she met your father. She was very young. Seventeen. The boy was adopted out without her full consent, her family arranged it, it was a different time." He paused. "Your father found out about it early in their marriage. He used it as leverage for years. Threatened to expose it publicly, to find the boy and tell him who his mother was before she was ready, to use it in ways that would have caused damage she wasn't willing to risk."

I sat down in the chair nearest to me.

"I have a brother," I said.

"Half brother. Yes."

"You've known this."

"Since the second year of the investigation."

I looked at him. "And you didn't use it."

"No."

"Why?"

He looked at me for a long moment. "Because it had nothing to do with your father's crimes. It was your mother's private history. Using it would have caused harm to people who had nothing to do with what Klifor Darclen did." A pause. "And because by that point I knew you. And I knew what it would do to you when you found out."

The study was very quiet. Outside the window the garden was moving slowly in the wind, that wild part near the tree line bending and straightening.

"You protected her," I said.

"I protected the information."

"That's the same thing."

He didn't answer.

I opened my bag and took out the envelope and held it in my hands. "She knew. She said in the letter that she believed you chose not to use it and she didn't know your reasons but she was grateful." I looked down at my name on the front of the envelope in her handwriting. "She trusted you more than she trusted my father, which given everything isn't a high bar, but still."

"Charlotte—"

"How long have you known about the will?"

The shift was slight but I caught it. A fraction of tension moving through his jaw, something adjusting behind his eyes.

There it was.

"How long, Frederick."

He set his hands flat on the desk beside him. "Six weeks."

I absorbed that.

Six weeks. The apartment on Calloway Street. The job at Rosa's restaurant. The coffee from the bakery and the note on the napkin and all those small careful gestures that I had been slowly, against my better judgment, allowing to mean something.

All of it set against the fact that he had known for six weeks that I was about to become financially independent and hadn't said a word.

"You let me struggle," I said. Not accusingly. Just factually, turning it over. "You knew I was about to inherit enough money to stand on my own feet and you said nothing and watched me worry about rent and medication and—"

"Yes," he said. Quiet and direct, no defence in it.

"Why?"

He looked at me. And for once, Frederick Lancaster, who always knew what to say and how and when, said nothing for a long moment.

Then, "Because I wasn't ready for you to not need anything from me."

The words landed somewhere I wasn't prepared for.

I looked at him sitting on the edge of that worn desk in the low light of the study, this complicated, difficult, deeply frustrating man who had taken my life apart piece by piece and was now sitting in front of me telling me he had delayed putting it back together because he didn't want to watch me walk away.

I should have been furious.

Part of me was.

But underneath the fury something else was happening that I couldn't stop, something that had been building slowly and quietly for weeks, in kitchens and hallways and restaurants and sleepless nights.

I stood up and crossed the room.

I stopped in front of him, close, close enough that I had to look up and he had to look down and there was nothing between us but the question of what happened next.

"That's not good enough," I said softly.

"I know it isn't," he said. Just as softly.

Neither of us moved.

His hand came up slowly and his fingers found my jaw, barely touching, the same way they had in the kitchen that morning, like a question he wasn't sure he was allowed to ask.

This time I didn't step back.

His thumb traced along my cheekbone, slow and deliberate, and I felt it everywhere, that single careful touch, like the first drop of rain after a very long dry season.

"Charlotte," he said. Just my name. Nothing else.

And I realised I had been waiting to hear him say it like that, without agenda, without strategy, without anything underneath it except exactly what it was.

For a very long time.