Chapter 21 021

Chapter 21 021
Charlotte's POV

Chapter Twenty One

I stepped back.

Not far. Just enough to think clearly, which I couldn't do with his hand on my face and his eyes doing what they were doing.

He let me go without hesitation, which somehow made it harder.

I went to the window and stood where he'd been standing when I came in and looked out at the garden. The wild grass near the trees was still moving. It was always moving, that part of the garden. Like it had given up trying to stay still.

I understood the feeling.

"I need to think," I said.

"I know."

"About all of it. My mother. The brother I didn't know existed. The will." I paused. "You."

He said nothing.

"I'm not angry," I said, which surprised me as I said it because I'd expected to be. "I think I should be. I think any reasonable person in my position would be furious right now." I turned around and looked at him. "But I've used up a lot of energy on anger this past year and I don't have the reserves for it tonight."

He was watching me from the desk. He hadn't moved since I'd stepped back. He was giving me the room, physically and otherwise, and I noticed that and filed it away.

"I have a brother," I said.

"Yes."

"Somewhere."

"Yes."

"Do you know where?"

He considered that for a moment. "My investigators found a name. An approximate location. It was two years ago so things may have changed." He paused. "If you want to find him I can make some calls."

I looked at the ceiling briefly. A brother. A real one, blood and bone, somewhere in the world going about his life with no idea that I existed. No idea that our mother had died in a small rented house two hundred miles from the city with a photograph of a baby on her mantelpiece.

Whether that photograph had been of me or of him I didn't know.

Maybe both.

"Not yet," I said. "I'm not ready for that yet." I sat back down in the chair across from the desk and looked at my hands. "I need to get through Monday first."

Monday. My father's release.

Frederick's expression did something at the mention of it. Tightened slightly around the eyes.

"You're not meeting him alone," he said.

"I haven't decided if I'm meeting him at all."

"Charlotte—"

"I mean it. I haven't decided." I looked at him steadily. "And if I do, I'll make that decision myself. You don't get a vote."

He accepted that with the particular stillness he used when he disagreed with something but recognised he had no standing to push back on it. I had learned to read that stillness during our marriage. It used to frustrate me. Tonight it felt almost like respect.

"Tell me about the investigation," I said.

He looked at me carefully. "Which part."

"The beginning." I settled back in the chair. "I've heard pieces of it. In the courtroom, in the press, from you in fragments when it suits you." I held his gaze. "I want to hear it from the start. All of it. The parts that aren't comfortable."

He was quiet for a moment.

Then he got up and went to the small table by the bookshelf and poured two glasses of water and brought them both back and handed one to me and sat down in the chair on the other side of the desk, properly this time, not on the edge of it.

Like he was settling in for something long and honest.

Good.

"I was twenty two," he said. "When Hurricane Samantha hit. We'd just moved into the new house, my parents and my younger sister. My father had taken out the insurance policy eight months before." He turned the water glass slowly in his hands. "When the claim went in your father's company disputed it. Found a clause buried in the paperwork. Refused to pay out." He paused. "We lost the house. My father spent three years fighting it legally and got nowhere because your father had better lawyers and more money and the patience to wait people out until they ran out of both."

I listened.

"My sister was twelve. She'd just started at a new school. We moved into my aunt's spare room, four of us, for two years." He looked at the glass. "My father never really recovered from it. Not financially, not otherwise. He'd built everything he had into that house and watching it go and not being able to do anything about it—" He stopped. Started again. "He died when I was twenty six. Heart attack. My mother says it was the stress that did it. I think she's right."

The study was very quiet.

I had known the outline of this. It had come out in the trial, in the press coverage, in the way people had talked about Frederick Lancaster as though he were a kind of hero. The self made man who brought down the corrupt insurance empire. The story had a clean shape when you heard it that way.

Sitting here in the low light of his study it had a different shape entirely.

"So you built the company," I said.

"Over eight years. Yes."

"And then you came for my father."

"Yes."

"And you needed someone on the inside," I said. "Someone who could give you access. To the family, to the financial records, to the social circle." I kept my voice even. "And I was the easiest way in."

He met my gaze. "You were never easy, Charlotte. Nothing about you was easy."

I looked at him.

"But yes," he said quietly. "That was the plan."

I nodded slowly.

I had known this. I had known it since the day I dropped my ring on the driveway. But there is a difference between knowing something and sitting across from the person responsible and hearing them say it plainly in a room lit by a single lamp while outside the wind moves through the old trees.

"Did you feel anything?" I said. "During the marriage. Any of it."

He didn't answer immediately.

He looked at the glass in his hands and then at me and when he spoke his voice was lower than it had been.

"I felt everything," he said. "That was the problem."

The lamp between us flickered once, briefly, like it was making a point.

I looked down at my water glass.

Outside the wild grass bent in the wind and straightened again and the house held its silence around us and I sat with his words in the quiet and didn't know what to do with them yet.

But I didn't get up.

And neither did he.