Chapter 24 24

Chapter 24 24
Charlotte's POV

Chapter Twenty Four

I didn't give him an answer that day.

He stayed for two hours, long enough to make sure I had eaten something proper and taken my medication and wasn't going to end up back on the bathroom floor the moment he left. He didn't push for a response to what he'd said. He just made tea and sat in the chair and let me rest and when he left he said he'd check in tomorrow.

The door closed and the apartment went quiet and I lay on the sofa and stared at the ceiling and thought about the word he'd used.

Mine.

Not a question. Not quite a statement. Something in between, like a door left open that he was standing on the wrong side of, waiting to see if I would walk through it.

I pressed my hand to my stomach and told myself the warmth I felt was the tea.

\---

Monday came the way difficult days always do. Too quickly and with completely ordinary weather, as though the sky hadn't received the memo about how significant it was.

My father was released at nine in the morning.

I knew because it was on the news. I saw it on my phone while I was getting dressed, a brief clip of him walking out through a set of doors in a dark coat, thinner than I remembered, moving slowly, a legal representative at each elbow. He didn't stop for the cameras. He kept his head down and got into a waiting car and was gone.

I watched the clip twice.

He looked old.

That was the thing that hit me unexpectedly. Not anger, not the complicated grief I had been bracing for. Just the simple and somehow devastating observation that my father looked old. The man I remembered had filled every room he walked into. This man on my phone screen looked like someone had let the air out of him.

I didn't know what to do with that so I put my phone down and finished getting dressed.

He called at eleven.

I answered because I had decided the night before that not answering was just postponing something that needed to happen.

"Charlotte." His voice was slower than it had been even on the first call. More careful.

"I saw the news," I said. "You're out."

"I'm out." A pause. "How are you?"

"Don't do that."

A short silence. "Fair enough." He breathed slowly. "I need to see you. Today if possible."

"Why today?"

"Because there are things that can't wait and I've already waited too long." He paused. "I know I have no right to ask anything of you. I know that. But I'm asking anyway."

I looked out the window at the rooftops.

"There's a café on Meredith Street," I said. "I'll be there at two."

I called Frederick after I hung up.

He answered on the second ring.

"He called," I said.

"I know. My people flagged his phone activity this morning." A pause. "Before you say anything, it's a precaution. Not surveillance."

"There's a thin line between those two things."

"I know."

"I'm meeting him at two. Meredith Street café." I paused. "I'm telling you because I said I would. Not because I need you there."

A longer pause this time. "I'll be close by."

"Frederick—"

"Not inside. Just close." His voice was firm but not aggressive. "Don't ask me to be further away than that."

I didn't ask him to be further away.

\---

My father was already there when I arrived.

He was sitting at a corner table with a glass of water in front of him, both hands wrapped around it. He looked up when I walked in and something crossed his face that I wasn't prepared for.

Relief.

Like he'd spent the whole morning genuinely unsure I would come.

I sat down across from him and looked at him properly for the first time in over a year. The weight loss was more visible up close. The colour in his face was wrong, too grey, too flat. His hands around the glass were thinner than I remembered.

"You look well," he said.

"You don't," I said honestly.

He almost smiled. "No. I don't suppose I do."

The waitress came. I ordered tea. He didn't order anything else.

"I know about my mother," I said. I had decided on the way here to start there. No preamble, no warm up. "I know she was alive. I know where she was living. I know how she died." I held his gaze. "I know what you held over her."

He closed his eyes briefly.

"Charlotte—"

"I also know about my brother."

He went very still.

The café moved around us, ordinary and indifferent. Someone laughed at the table near the window. A coffee machine hissed behind the counter.

"You found out about James," he said quietly.

James.

My brother had a name and my father had just given it to me without meaning to and I sat with it for a moment before I could continue.

"Tell me why," I said. "All of it. Why you moved her. Why you lied. Why you kept paying for her to live in that town when you could have just let her go completely."

He looked at his water glass for a long moment.

"Because I loved her," he said. "Even after everything. Even when it became something broken and ugly and wrong, I couldn't let her disappear entirely." He looked up at me and his eyes were old and tired and entirely serious. "That's not an excuse. I know what I did. I know what it cost her and what it cost you." He paused. "But you asked for the truth and that's part of it."

I sat back in my chair.

"There's something else," he said. His voice had changed again. Dropped lower. "Something I should have told you a long time ago." He looked at me steadily. "Something about Frederick Lancaster."

I kept my face completely still.

"He didn't find you by accident," my father said. "He didn't choose you because you were the easiest way into the family."

I waited.

"He chose you because I hired him to."

The café noise continued around me, cheerful and distant.

"What did you say?" I said very quietly.

My father's eyes didn't move from mine.

"Ten years ago I paid Frederick Lancaster's firm a considerable sum of money," he said. "To protect our family from exactly the kind of investigation he later built against me." He paused. "He took my money, Charlotte. For two years he worked for me. And then somewhere along the way he changed sides."

I stared at him.

"He was mine first," my father said quietly. "Before he was anything else."

The tea in front of me had gone cold.

I hadn't touched it once.