Chapter 27 27

Chapter 27 27
Charlotte's POV

Chapter Twenty Seven

James.

I stood under that streetlight and read the message four more times as if the words might rearrange themselves into something less significant.

They didn't.

My brother had found me. Not the other way around. He had found me first, which meant he had been looking, which meant he knew I existed, which meant someone had told him or he had figured it out himself and I had absolutely no way of knowing yet which one it was.

I typed and deleted three different replies.

Finally I wrote two words.

How long.

The reply came quickly, like he'd been holding his phone waiting.

Three months. I've been trying to work up the nerve.

I stood there in the cold with the streetlight humming and the city moving around me and thought about a man I had never met spending three months working up the nerve to send four sentences to a stranger who was also his sister.

I understood that feeling completely.

I wrote back.

Can we meet. Not yet. But soon.

His reply came even faster this time.

Whenever you're ready. I'm not going anywhere.

I put my phone in my pocket and walked home.

\---

I didn't sleep well.

Not because of James, or not only because of James. It was everything together, the accumulated weight of the past week pressing down in the dark. My father in the prison hospital. My mother's letter in the drawer beside my bed. The note from Frederick folded in yesterday's apron pocket.

I kept thinking about what my father had said.

He was mine first.

I had been turning it over for days, picking it up and putting it down, not ready to do anything with it but unable to leave it alone entirely. Like a loose thread you keep touching without pulling.

By six I gave up on sleep and made tea and sat at the kitchen table with Ashes on my lap and thought about it properly for the first time.

If Frederick had worked for my father ten years ago it would have been early in his career. Before the company became what it was. Before the name carried the weight it carried now. A young man building something from nothing, the way he had described it, working his fingers to the bone, learning which doors to knock on and which people to know.

My father would have been exactly the kind of client a rising firm needed.

The money. The connections. The credibility that came from being associated with a name like Darclen.

I could see it clearly and that was the problem.

I could see Frederick at twenty something sitting across from my father in that office with the view of the city and taking the work because he needed it and telling himself it was just business and it didn't mean anything.

And then I could see the moment it stopped being just business.

When his family lost their home. When his father got sick. When the thing he had been doing for money became personal in a way that changed everything.

The question was how long the overlap had been.

How long had he worked for my father while already knowing what he was going to do.

And where exactly in that timeline did I appear.

\---

Frederick knocked at nine.

I opened the door and looked at him and he looked at me and something passed between us that had no name yet.

"You didn't reply," he said.

"I know."

"Can I come in?"

I stepped back.

He came in and sat in the chair, his usual chair, which had become his chair through repetition rather than invitation. He looked at me across the small room with that careful measured expression that I had been seeing differently since my father's hospital room.

I sat on the sofa and pulled my knees up and looked at him.

"My brother contacted me," I said.

Something shifted in his face. "When?"

"Last night. After my shift." I watched him carefully. "He found me. I don't know how yet."

He was quiet for a moment. Thoughtful rather than evasive. "Are you alright?"

"I don't know what I am." I kept my eyes on him. "I want to ask you something and I want you to answer me honestly. Not carefully. Not with the version that's easiest for me to hear. Honestly."

He held my gaze. "Alright."

"Did you work for my father?"

The room went very still.

He didn't look away. He didn't reach for a careful version of the answer. He just sat in the chair with his hands on his knees and looked at me and said it plainly.

"Yes."

One word.

I sat with it.

"For how long?"

"Fourteen months."

"And then?"

"And then I found out what he was doing. What he had been doing for years." His voice was even but there was something underneath it, something old and unresolved. "I found the first evidence by accident. A discrepancy in some financial documentation he asked us to review." He paused. "Once I saw it I couldn't unsee it."

"So you switched sides."

"I stopped working for him. There's a difference."

"Is there?"

He looked at the floor briefly. "I gave back the money. Every penny. My firm nearly went under because of it." He looked back at me. "I've never told anyone that."

I absorbed that.

"Why didn't you tell me?" I said quietly. "When you told me about the investigation. About all of it. You told me so much and you left that out."

"Because it's the part that makes me look worst," he said simply. "Everything else I can frame as justice. As doing the right thing eventually." A pause. "That part is just me being twenty four and ambitious and not asking enough questions about where the money came from."

The apartment was very quiet.

Outside a car passed. Ashes moved from the kitchen to the sofa and pressed himself against my side.

"There's something else," Frederick said.

I looked at him.

"Your brother." He leaned forward slightly. "James Calloway. He's thirty two. He lives forty minutes from here." A pause. "He contacted you last night because I told him where to find you."

I stared at him.

"You told him."

"Three weeks ago. I found him through the investigators and I reached out and told him he had a sister." His voice was careful now. "I should have told you I was going to do that. I made the decision without asking you and that was wrong."

I sat very still.

"You keep making decisions about my life," I said. "Without asking."

"I know."

"The apartment. The will. My brother." I shook my head slowly. "What else, Frederick? What else have you decided for me that I don't know about yet?"

He was quiet for a moment.

And the quality of that quiet was different from his usual quiet.

This one had something in it.

Something he was deciding whether to say.

"Tell me," I said.

He looked at me across the small room in the grey morning light and said the thing he had been holding back.

"Your father didn't just hire me to protect the family ten years ago," he said. "He hired me specifically to find out everything about your mother. Where she was. Whether she was still alive." A pause. "I was the one who found her, Charlotte. I found her and I told him where she was."

The room tilted slightly.

"And then?" I said. My voice came out very quiet.

"And then six months later she was dead."

The silence that followed was the heaviest one we'd had yet.

I looked at this man sitting in my small apartment in the chair that had become his chair and I thought about my mother in a small house two hundred miles away with a photograph on the mantelpiece.

And I understood now why he had given the money back.

And why five years hadn't felt like long enough.