Chapter 23 23

Chapter 23 23
Charlotte's POV

Chapter Twenty Three

I woke up on the bathroom floor.

I don't know how long I'd been there. Long enough for the tiles to leave a mark on my cheek. Long enough for Ashes to find me and install himself against my side with the focused concern he reserved for moments when he sensed something was wrong.

The pain had started around two in the morning. I had recognised it immediately, that deep burning that started low and spread upward, different from the gastritis flares I had learned to manage. This was sharper. More insistent. The kind of pain that doesn't respond to the usual things.

I had taken my medication. Drunk water. Lain very still on the bed and waited for it to pass the way it usually did.

It hadn't passed.

By three I was in the bathroom and by four I was on the floor and by the time grey morning light started coming through the small frosted window I had stopped trying to get up.

Ashes pressed his nose against my hand.

"I'm fine," I told him.

He looked at me with the expression he used when he disagreed but lacked the vocabulary to argue.

I pulled myself up slowly using the edge of the bath and sat on the cold rim of it and breathed carefully. The pain had settled into something duller but it was still there, a persistent pressure under my ribs that made straightening up fully uncomfortable.

I needed to call in to Rosa.

I needed to eat something even though the thought of it turned my stomach.

I needed to not be on a bathroom floor.

I managed all three in a limited sense. I called Rosa who told me not to be an idiot and to rest and that she'd see me Thursday. I made plain toast and ate half of it standing at the kitchen counter. I moved from the bathroom to the sofa and lay down with a blanket and Ashes on my feet.

I did not call Frederick.

I made that decision clearly and deliberately and I was still maintaining it at eleven in the morning when someone knocked on my door.

I already knew.

I opened it anyway.

He was in a dark coat, no tie, the same shadows under his eyes from yesterday. He looked at me standing in the doorway in yesterday's clothes with my hair undone and something sharpened immediately in his expression.

"You look terrible," he said.

"Good morning to you too."

He came in without being invited, which would have irritated me more if moving to block the doorway hadn't felt like an unreasonable amount of effort.

I went back to the sofa.

He stood in the middle of the room and looked at me lying there with my blanket and my half eaten toast on the coffee table and his jaw tightened in that way it did when he was trying to keep his reaction contained.

"How long?" he said.

"Since two."

"Have you eaten?"

"Some toast."

"Have you kept it down?"

I looked at the ceiling. "Mostly."

He took his coat off and put it over the chair and went into the kitchen and I heard him moving around, opening cupboards, filling the kettle. I didn't have the energy to tell him to stop.

He came back with a glass of water and my medication and set them on the coffee table.

"You missed your morning dose," he said.

"I know. I was on the bathroom floor."

Something moved through his face. He sat down in the chair across from me and leaned forward with his elbows on his knees and looked at me seriously.

"I want you to see a specialist," he said.

"I have a doctor."

"A specialist, Charlotte. A gastroenterologist. Someone who can actually diagnose what's happening properly instead of managing symptoms indefinitely." He held my gaze. "This isn't normal. Ending up on the floor in the middle of the night is not something you just push through."

"I can't afford a specialist."

"I'll pay for it."

"No."

"Charlotte—"

"No, Frederick." I sat up slightly, which hurt but felt necessary for the conversation I could see coming. "I have money now. My mother's estate. I can take care of my own medical bills."

"The estate hasn't cleared yet. That takes time."

"Then I'll wait until it does."

He looked at me with the particular frustration of someone who has a solution and is being prevented from applying it.

"There's something I want to propose," he said.

Something in his tone made me pay attention. It was different from the careful measured way he'd been speaking for the past weeks. More formal. Like he had rehearsed this after all.

"Come back to the house," he said.

I opened my mouth.

"Hear me out." His voice was steady. "You're not well. You're living alone and working evening shifts and managing a medical situation that is clearly getting worse and you found out yesterday that your mother is dead and your father is being released Monday." He paused. "Come back to the house. Proper meals. Mrs. Albrecht. The room on the third floor."

"We already did this," I said carefully. "One week. That was the arrangement. I held to it."

"I'm not talking about the same arrangement."

I looked at him.

He held my gaze without flinching. "I want you close. I want to know you're being looked after. And I think part of you, the part that's been lying on this sofa all morning instead of calling anyone, knows that you need that whether you want to admit it or not."

"And in return?" I said quietly.

Because there was something in his voice. Something he hadn't said yet. I had spent enough time in rooms with this man to know when a sentence wasn't finished.

He looked at me for a long moment.

"Stay close to me," he said. "Not as my ex wife. Not as someone I owe a debt to." A pause. "Mine. In whatever way you're willing."

The room was very still.

"You're asking me to be your mistress," I said.

He didn't look away. "I'm asking you to give me a chance to do this right."

"That's a very careful way of saying yes."

He said nothing.

I looked at this man sitting across from me in my small apartment, this man who had built a five year plan around my family's destruction and somewhere in the middle of it had felt everything and called it a problem.

I thought about the house. The warm kitchen. Mrs. Albrecht's soup. The room on the third floor with the badly painted water stain on the ceiling that had felt, in spite of everything, more like safety than anywhere I'd been in a year.

I thought about being on the bathroom floor at four in the morning with nobody knowing.

"I'll think about it," I said.

His eyes stayed on mine.

"That's not a no," he said quietly.

"It's not a yes either," I said.

But we both knew the difference between those two things had started to get smaller.

And neither of us said anything else for a long time.