Chapter 28 028

Chapter 28 028
Charlotte's POV

Chapter Twenty Eight

I didn't ask him to leave.

That surprised me more than anything else. After everything he had just said, after the ground had shifted under me for what felt like the hundredth time in two weeks, I sat on that sofa with Ashes pressed against my side and looked at Frederick Lancaster and didn't tell him to get out.

I think he was surprised too.

He sat very still in the chair, like a man who had just put something heavy down and wasn't sure what happened next. Like he'd been carrying that particular weight for so long that putting it down felt wrong in its own way.

I looked at my hands.

"You found her," I said. "And then she died."

"Yes."

"And you've been living with that."

He didn't answer straight away. "Every day."

I looked up at him. "Is that why you came for my father? Not just for your family. For her."

Something moved through his expression. Raw and brief and quickly contained. "Yes."

I nodded slowly.

I didn't forgive him. I want to be clear about that. Forgiveness wasn't what was happening in that room. What was happening was something quieter and more complicated, the particular process of taking a person you thought you understood and rebuilding them from different pieces into something more accurate and harder to dismiss.

Frederick Lancaster had done a terrible thing.

He had also spent the better part of a decade trying to answer for it.

Those two things could both be true.

"I need some time," I said.

"I know."

"I mean it this time. Real time. Not days." I held his gaze. "I have to meet my brother. I have to deal with my father's situation. I have to let the estate clear and find my feet properly." I paused. "I can't do any of that and process this at the same time."

He nodded. "Whatever you need."

"I'm not saying never," I said, and immediately wondered why I'd added that. He hadn't asked. I hadn't needed to qualify it.

But I had.

He looked at me for a moment. Something steadied in his expression. "I'll be here," he said quietly. "Take the time."

He left ten minutes later.

I sat in the empty apartment and listened to the door close and thought about my mother in that small house and whether she had known, at the end, that the man who had found her had eventually tried to make it right.

I hoped she had known.

I didn't know if she had.

\---

James Calloway wanted to meet in a park.

He had suggested it in his second message, sent the morning after the first. Somewhere open, he'd written. Less pressure than sitting across a table. We can just walk.

I had read that and thought that I liked him already, which was a strange thing to feel about a stranger.

We arranged it for Saturday afternoon.

I arrived ten minutes early and stood at the entrance watching people move along the path with dogs and pushchairs and coffees and all the ordinary business of a Saturday. The trees were bare but the park had that particular winter quality, clean and still, the kind of cold that felt honest rather than punishing.

I saw him before he saw me.

He was standing near the bench we'd agreed on, hands in his coat pockets, looking in the wrong direction. Dark hair. Medium height. There was something in the set of his shoulders that I couldn't place immediately, something familiar in a way that had nothing to do with having met before.

Then he turned and saw me and I understood.

He had our mother's eyes.

The same shape, the same particular quality of attention in them. I knew this because I had spent two days after receiving the letter looking at the one photograph Patricia Howe had given me, a small faded thing taken before I was born, and memorising a face I had never been allowed to know.

Those eyes.

He looked at me and I could see him doing the same thing, looking for the parts that matched.

We stood about ten feet apart for a moment.

"Charlotte," he said.

"James," I said.

And then neither of us said anything for a little while because there wasn't a script for this and we were both smart enough not to pretend there was.

We walked.

He was easy to talk to, which I hadn't fully prepared for. I had braced for awkwardness, for the particular stilted quality of two people with enormous context and no shared history trying to find a register that worked. But he moved through conversation the way some people do, without forcing it, comfortable with the pauses, not filling them with noise.

He was an architect. He had grown up in the north with a good family, he said it simply and without guilt, people who had wanted him and raised him well and told him when he was old enough that he was adopted and left the door open for whatever he wanted to do with that information.

He had done nothing with it for years.

"I wasn't ready," he said. "And then something shifted. I don't know what exactly. I just woke up one morning and the not knowing felt heavier than the knowing might."

I understood that too.

"How did you find out about me specifically?" I said.

He was quiet for a step or two. "Someone contacted me. A few months ago. Said he had information about my biological family if I wanted it." He paused. "He knew a lot. More than I would have expected. He was thorough."

I kept my voice even. "Did he give you a name?"

"Frederick Lancaster."

I looked at the path ahead of us.

Of course.

"Do you know him?" James asked, watching me.

"Yes," I said carefully. "We're acquainted."

James nodded slowly. Something in his expression suggested he knew there was more to that sentence and was choosing not to pull on it.

We walked in silence for a moment.

Then he said, "There's something I need to tell you. About why I finally sent that message last night." He paused. "It wasn't just nerves wearing down."

I looked at him.

"Someone else contacted me this week," he said. "Not Lancaster this time." He stopped walking and turned to face me. "Charlotte, a man called Klifor Darclen reached out to me from the prison hospital."

I went very still.

"He told me things about our mother," James said. "Things that don't match what Lancaster told me." His eyes were serious and careful and very much our mother's. "And I think one of them is lying to you."

The bare trees stood around us and the cold moved through the park and I stood on that path between my brother I had just met and the truth I hadn't found yet.

And I realised the ground wasn't done shifting.

Not even close.