Chapter 72 Clean

Chapter 72 Clean


Richard’s POV

I sat in the car outside the hospital and did not move for a long moment.

The tears came before I could stop them.

I pressed my fingers to my eyes and breathed through it until it passed.

Then I started the car and drove home, to unravel whatever took my child.

The house was quiet when I arrived.

I went directly to the security room and pulled up the surveillance footage from the day. 

Every camera. Every angle. Kitchen, corridors, dining room, the sitting room where Jocelyn and Lilian had spent the afternoon.

I watched three hours of footage in forty minutes, moving through it systematically, looking for anything that didn’t belong.

No single trace of what happened. Everything was so smooth.

Whoever had done this had been careful.

The doctor had said the Oleander extract was introduced earlier in the day, before the evening, before the news segment, possibly as early as lunch. Which meant the culprit was someone present in this house during those hours.

The workers. Or Lilian.

Lilian.

I dismissed that thought completely and without ceremony. There was not a version of reality in which my mother poisoned Jocelyn.

I knew her with the absolute certainty of a man who had been raised by her, and that was simply not possible.

I thought about the workers and whatever hand Colton had in directing them.

I paid them well enough for them to betray me, who would dare do such a thing?

I wanted to think about Eric and Megan. 

The timing of their appearance at the hospital. Eric’s immediate suggestion that the paternity test be cancelled. The way he had stood slightly apart from everyone else in that corridor, arms crossed, face arranged into something that read as grief but sat wrong on him.

I pushed the thought aside.

My brother. My own brother.

Not yet. I would not go there yet without something concrete.

I picked up my phone and called the investigating officers.

They arrived within the hour, three of them, experienced and discreet, the kind of men who understood that certain investigations required silence as much as they required procedure.

I watched from the security room as they interviewed each member of staff in turn. 

Questions delivered calmly. Responses noted without visible reaction.

Face after face. Answer after answer.

Nothing.

The lead officer came to find me when they were done.

“Mr. Asher.” He stood in the doorway with the manner of someone delivering a conclusion he wasn’t satisfied with. “Whoever carried this out was professional. They knew where your cameras were positioned. They knew the timing. They left nothing behind and none of your staff have given us anything actionable.” He paused. “The person who did this is not on these premises.”

I nodded slowly.

“One more thing,” he added. “The level of access required suggests someone with intimate knowledge of this household. Routines. Schedules. Which staff would be where and when.”

“I understand,” I said.

He left.

I sat alone in the security room for a moment, then picked up my phone and called Lilian.

“I need everyone to come home,” I said when she answered. “You, Eric, Megan, Colton, Martha. Everyone.”

“Richard—”

“Please, Mum.”

A pause. “I’ll tell them.”

Ten minutes later she called back.

“Eric says he and Megan have somewhere they cannot postpone. He says he’s sorry but it can’t be moved.”

Of course.

“That’s fine,” I said. “Just you and Martha then. Come home.”

Another pause.

“Richard.” Her voice shifted slightly. “Martha isn’t here.”

“What do you mean?”

“She was here an hour ago and then she wasn’t. I thought she’d stepped out briefly. But she hasn’t come back and she isn’t answering her phone.”

I sat with that information for exactly three seconds.

“Come home, Mum. Now.”

Lilian arrived without Martha.

I waited.

I sat in the living room with every light on and my phone on the table and I waited for Martha to walk through that door and give me an explanation that made sense.

The minutes stretched.

Then the sound came from outside.

“Boom” a single gunshot that shook everyone.

Except me.

“Richard.” Lilian stood immediately. “Don’t.”

I was already moving.

“Richard, please—”

I was out the door before she finished.

I found her three streets from ours.

Martha lay on the pavement, completely still, the job done with a single shot to the head. 

Professional. Clean. The work of someone who could not afford her to speak.

I stood over her and said nothing for a long time.

She had worked in this house for over a decade. She had brought Jocelyn water without being asked. She had laid out clothes and replaced flowers and moved through the rooms of this house with a quiet faithfulness that I had taken entirely for granted.

And someone had used that faithfulness. Had found whatever she needed and exploited it. And when she became a liability, had removed her without hesitation.

Whoever had done this had done it well.

And they had done it fast, which meant they’d been watching. Which meant they knew that once the investigation started, Martha would be the first name to surface.

I called it in and stood there until the officers arrived.

Then I walked back to the house.

Lilian took the news the way she took all devastating things—quietly at first, and then not quietly at all.

She had known Martha longer than she had known most people in her life. Twenty-two years. She wept with the particular grief of someone mourning not just a person but a permanent fixture of their daily world.

I sat beside her and said nothing because there was nothing adequate to say.

Then her breathing changed.

“Mum.”

Her hand pressed to her chest. The color leaving her face in a way I recognized immediately.

I had the nurse on the phone before she could protest.

I left Lilian in the care of the nurse and drove back to the hospital.

The ward was quieter at this hour. The corridor the same white, the same antiseptic smell, the same brightness that felt cruel in the context of what it housed.

Jocelyn lay completely still.

Machines. Monitors. The slow and steady confirmation that she was still here, still fighting, her body working through something that had been done to it deliberately and without mercy.

I sat beside her bed and looked at her face.

The woman who had walked into my life under impossible circumstances and proceeded to dismantle every careful distance I had constructed around myself. Who argued with me over breakfast and stood her ground in rooms full of people who wanted her to shrink. Who had pressed a bracelet into a stranger’s hand on a bridge eight years ago and told him to stay alive for her.

Who was lying in this bed because someone in my family had decided she needed to be removed.

I picked up my phone and called Lauren.

It rang twice.

“Richard?” Her voice was careful, immediately alert.

“She’s in the hospital,” I said. “I think she’d want you here.”

“I’m on my way.” She hung up immediately, no excuses.

She arrived in under twenty minutes, still in her coat, her eyes red before she’d even fully entered the room. She looked at Jocelyn on the bed and pressed her hand over her mouth for a moment, composing herself with visible effort.

Then she pulled the chair to the opposite side of the bed from mine and sat.

We didn’t speak for a while.

Two people on opposite sides of a hospital bed, both watching the same face, both waiting for the same thing.

“She’s going to be fine,” Lauren said eventually. Not as comfort. As fact. As though she was refusing to consider any alternative.

I looked across at her.

“Yes,” I said. “She is.”

Outside, the city continued without us.

And tomorrow, whatever state we were all in, the paternity test would proceed exactly as scheduled.

I had promised that much.

And I intended to keep it.