Chapter 22 22

Chapter 22 22
Charlotte's POV

Chapter Twenty Two

I stayed longer than I intended.

That kept happening with this house. With him. I would arrive with a clear idea of how long I would stay and what I would say and how I would leave, and then something would shift and the plan would dissolve quietly without me noticing until I looked up and an hour had passed.

It was dark outside now. The garden had disappeared into it, just the faint outline of the tree line visible against the sky.

We had been talking for a long time.

Not about the important things, not anymore. After his last answer we had both seemed to arrive at the same unspoken agreement that we had gone as far as we could go tonight without getting into territory that neither of us was ready for. So we had pulled back, not awkwardly, just naturally, the way a conversation does when it's said the thing it needed to say and needs time to breathe.

He had told me about the investigation in more detail. The years of it. The patience it required. I had asked questions and he had answered them without deflecting and I had listened and tried to hold both things at once, the understanding of why he had done it and the reality of what it had cost me.

It was difficult.

But it was honest. And after a year of living inside the wreckage of a lie, honest felt like something worth staying for.

Mrs. Albrecht had appeared at some point with a plate of plain crackers and some soft cheese and had set it on the desk between us without comment and disappeared again. I had eaten some without thinking about it, which meant my appetite was coming back properly, which the doctor would have been pleased about.

"You should eat more than that," Frederick said.

"You sound like Mrs. Albrecht."

"She's a sensible woman."

"She is." I took another cracker. "She packed me a candle when I moved into the apartment. And two mugs. Without being asked."

Something softened in his expression. "She likes you."

"She has a strange way of showing it."

"That's just how she shows everything." A pause. "She told me I was a fool. After you left the house." He said it without looking at me, turning his water glass in that slow way he had. "She's worked for me for seven years and she has never once commented on my personal life and the morning after you moved out she came into my office and told me I was a fool and left again."

I looked at him. "What did you say?"

"Nothing." A beat. "She wasn't wrong."

I looked down at the plate.

The lamp on the desk was warm and low and outside the wind had settled into something quieter and the house was doing that thing it did where it felt removed from everything, like the rest of the city didn't quite exist from inside these walls.

I needed to go home.

I needed to go home and feed Ashes and take my medication and sleep and process the seventeen different things that had happened today before I made any decisions or said anything I couldn't take back.

I stood up.

He stood too, immediately, that automatic courtesy that had always been so natural in him it never felt performed.

"I'll call a car," he said.

"I can get a taxi."

"Charlotte."

"I can get a taxi, Frederick." But I said it without heat and he heard the difference and sat back down and picked up his phone anyway, not to call a car, just to have something to do with his hands.

I picked up my bag and put my mother's letter carefully back inside it. I thought about her sitting in a small house two hundred miles away writing three pages to a daughter she had watched from the edges. The patience of that. The particular heartbreak of it.

I thought about what Frederick had said. That he had kept her secret. That he had found the thing my father used against her and had looked at it and put it away and left it alone.

I thought about what kind of man does that in the middle of a five year plan built entirely on exposure and consequence.

A complicated one.

"My father is going to contact me again before Monday," I said.

"Probably."

"If he does I'll tell you." I held his gaze. "Not because I need your permission or your protection. Just because you have context I don't have and I'm not too proud to acknowledge that."

He nodded. "Thank you."

"Don't thank me yet." I moved toward the door and then stopped, because there was one more thing and I had been deciding all evening whether to say it and I had just decided.

I turned around.

He was watching me the way he'd been watching me all evening, carefully, like I was something he was trying very hard not to handle wrong.

"What you said earlier," I said. "About feeling everything. About that being the problem."

He waited.

"I'm not ready to do anything with that," I said. "I want you to know that I heard it. But I'm not ready." I held his gaze. "There's too much between us that's still broken and I'm not the kind of person who can pretend broken things aren't broken just because there's something else there underneath it."

He looked at me for a long moment.

"I know," he said. "I'm not asking you to."

"Good."

"I'll wait," he said simply. No drama in it, no performance. Just two words sitting in the room like they had every intention of staying there.

Something moved through me.

I turned back to the door before it could settle on my face.

"Goodnight Frederick," I said.

"Goodnight Charlotte."

I walked out through the hallway and out the front door and down the driveway between those tall dark trees and the cold air hit me and I put my head down and walked.

My heart was doing something it had no business doing.

I told it to stop.

It didn't.