Chapter 25 25

Chapter 25 25
Charlotte's POV

Chapter Twenty Five

I walked home.

It took forty minutes and I needed every one of them.

The city moved around me the way it always did, indifferent and busy, people with their heads down and their own problems tucked under their arms, nobody paying any attention to the woman walking too fast with her hands in her pockets and her jaw tight.

I passed a flower stall. A school with children coming out through the gates. A man arguing quietly on his phone outside a newsagent. All of it completely normal. All of it completely removed from the thing sitting in the center of my chest like something swallowed wrong.

He was mine first.

I turned it over as I walked. Looked at it from every angle.

My father was not a trustworthy man. I knew that better than anyone. He had lied to me my entire life about things far more fundamental than business arrangements. He had moved my mother to a town two hundred miles away and told me she died giving birth to me and sat across from me at birthday dinners and said it with a straight face for twenty five years.

A man who could do that could say anything.

I knew that.

And yet.

The thing about a lie that lands is that it doesn't land because it's entirely false. It lands because it contains something that fits. Some small detail that slots into a gap you didn't know was there and suddenly the whole picture looks different.

Frederick Lancaster. Self made. Deliberate. Patient in a way that went beyond ordinary ambition. A man who had spent five years building a case against my father with the kind of focused precision that didn't leave room for accidents or coincidences.

A man who had chosen me specifically.

I stopped at the corner of my street and stood there for a moment.

The wind came through and pushed my hair across my face and I left it there.

Had he chosen me because I was the easiest route in. That was the version I had been living with for over a year, the one that hurt in a way I had grown accustomed to, a familiar shape of pain.

Or had he chosen me because my father had once paid him to know everything about our family, every weakness and every pressure point, and somewhere in that information was me, and he had filed that away and used it years later when it suited him.

Those two versions of the story felt different in a way I couldn't entirely articulate.

I started walking again.

\---

Ashes met me at the door with the energy of someone who had been waiting for hours and had opinions about it.

I fed him and took my medication and sat on the sofa and looked at the wall.

My phone had two messages on it. One from Frederick, sent forty minutes ago.

How did it go.

Not a question. That was a thing about him, he rarely used question marks, like he was too certain of receiving an answer to bother asking properly.

The second message was from an unknown number that turned out, when I opened it, to be Patricia Howe's office. Something about paperwork for the estate. I put that one aside.

I looked at Frederick's message for a long time.

I didn't reply.

I put the phone face down on the cushion beside me and lay back and looked at the ceiling and thought about ten years ago. Frederick would have been in his mid twenties. Still building. Still climbing. My father at that point had been at the height of everything, the company performing, the name carrying weight, the kind of client that a rising firm would have wanted badly.

It was plausible.

That was the problem. It was entirely plausible.

And if it was true, if Frederick had sat across from my father and taken his money and learned everything there was to know about the Darclen family, then the question that followed was not whether he had done it.

The question was when he had stopped.

And why.

My father had said he changed sides. He had said it like it was a betrayal, which from his perspective it was. But changing sides implied a moment. A decision. Something that had shifted Frederick from one position to another.

I wanted to know what that was.

I wasn't ready to ask him yet.

\---

Rosa called at four to check on me which I hadn't expected and which made me feel something uncomplicated and warm in the middle of an otherwise very complicated day.

"You sound strange," she said.

"I'm fine."

"You sound like someone who is fine in the way people are fine when they're absolutely not fine."

"I had a difficult afternoon."

"Do you want to talk about it?"

"Not yet."

A pause. "Come in Thursday. Early. I'll feed you before the shift." She said it gruffly, like she was annoyed at herself for offering. "You're too thin."

"Mrs. Albrecht says the same thing."

"Who's Mrs. Albrecht?"

"Someone else who feeds me without being asked."

Rosa made a sound that might have been approval and hung up.

I sat with the phone in my hand and thought about the strange small ways the world offers you something steady when everything else is moving.

Rosa who fed people before their shifts. Mrs. Albrecht who packed candles for empty apartments. Ashes who appeared on bathroom floors at four in the morning and stayed.

I thought about Frederick bringing two coffees up three flights of stairs and saying he was passing when he wasn't.

I thought about him sitting on the edge of his desk saying I felt everything, that was the problem.

I thought about my father's face across the café table.

He was mine first.

I closed my eyes.

I wasn't going to sort this out tonight. There was too much of it and I was too tired and my stomach was still pulling in that low persistent way that meant I needed to eat something and rest properly.

Tomorrow I would think about it.

Tomorrow I would decide what to ask and how and when.

Tonight I just needed to be still.

I pulled the blanket over myself and Ashes climbed up and settled against my side and outside the window the city went on doing what cities do.

And somewhere across town Frederick Lancaster was waiting for a reply that wasn't coming yet.

Let him wait.

For once in this entire mess, let him be the one who didn't know what was coming next.