Chapter Three Tristan
Chapter three
Tristan
The oncology day unit was quieter than court, but not by much.
The noise was different. Threaded with machines and measured voices, the hum of things designed for keeping people alive rather than deciding whether they deserved to be.
Chairs lined the walls in careful arcs, most of them occupied by people pretending not to look at one another.
IV poles stood beside each seat, part of the room’s rigid logic.
Clear bags. Slow drips. Time measured in millilitres.
My father sat beside the window, a blanket folded neatly across his knees, his coat draped over the back of the chair.
He’d insisted on wearing a tie, even here.
Old habits clung hard. His hair had thinned more than he liked to admit, the grey at his temples sharper now, skin faintly translucent.
But his posture was still immaculate. Back straight. Hands steady.
The law had always been his armour.
I sat beside him with my laptop open, files balanced on the narrow tray table that wobbled whenever I moved.
It wasn’t technically a day off. I’d brought work with me under the pretence of efficiency, but really it was about control.
Keeping my hands busy so the worry didn’t surface.
And as I’d been petulant early on, irritated at being sidelined during his diagnosis and treatment, I didn’t get to opt out now.
This was my obligation, my turn to sit and wait, even if work was piling up and the other things fracturing my attention that I couldn’t afford to think about too closely.
“Your mother asked me to remind you about the baby shower,” Father said, eyes focused on the middle distance rather than me.
I glanced up from my laptop. “Eloise is what? Twelve weeks?”
“Fourteen.”
I frowned. “Isn’t it customary to wait until at least the twenty-week mark before tempting fate?”
He allowed himself the smallest smile. “She’ll be twenty-five weeks by the date of the party. This is not, apparently, a negotiable detail.”
“I see.” I returned to my papers. “And I’m being reminded because…?”
“Because you will block the time in your diary.”
I looked up again. “Have you?”
He said nothing.
I made a note in the margin of my disclosure schedule. “I thought baby showers were largely the preserve of the women of the family.”
That earned me a look. “I trust I don’t need to explain why that observation is now considered both archaic and faintly embarrassing.”
“I stand corrected.” I scribbled again. “Will a present be expected?”
“I should imagine so.”
I slipped my phone from my pocket and opened it. “I’ll see what Burberry thinks an infant can’t live without.”
“She has a list.”
I paused. “A list.”
“In Selfridges.”
“Of course she does.”
I navigated to the app, entered Eloise Hale-Fitzroy, and took in the parade of objects no baby could possibly require. After a moment’s consideration, I selected a set of muslin cloths.
“Will you…” Father trailed off, as if searching for the right carefully spontaneous word. And I understood why when he finally said, “…be bringing someone?”
I locked my phone and slid it away. “I could see if Henry is free.”
He tilted his head. “Someone your mother would like to meet.”
Ah.
“No,” I said, without room for discussion.
He studied me for a moment, then sighed. “There are several very suitable…men, Tristan. Your mother would be delighted to provide you with a list.”
“I’m sure she would.” I shook my head. “It won’t be necessary.”
“Your mother worries.” Father fiddled with his sleeve. “Not excessively. But… perhaps appropriately.”
I hummed, noncommittal.
“It’s been some time since you brought anyone to dinner. Or mentioned a date.”
“I don’t schedule them.” I kept my focus on my notes. “They tend to happen organically.”
“Do they?” His tone was mild. Curious, rather than sceptical.
“Not recently.”
Not at all, really. How could I go looking for something I didn’t want?
He nodded once, as if that confirmed something. “Your mother wondered whether it was a matter of inclination or opportunity.”
I glanced up. “Those aren’t mutually exclusive.”
A corner of his mouth twitched. “No. They aren’t.”
We sat in silence for a while longer, the drip beside him ticking steadily, the low murmur of the unit filling the space where more candid families might have spoken.
Until my father broke it with, “Lord Wolfe asked after you.”
My fingers paused over the keyboard. “Oh?”
“At a dinner last week. Perfectly innocuous. He said he hasn’t seen you of late and was curious how you were settling into practice.”
“That’s kind of him.”
“He suggested you might benefit from broadening your circle. Socially, as well as professionally.”
I closed my laptop. “And you thought?”
“I thought he was offering something in his own idiom. Access. Visibility. Connections.”
“Companionship?” I tipped my head.
“I would suspect that is an option.” Father looked away and I couldn’t gather the inference in his tone.
So I had to check. “One that you favour?”
He glanced back to me. “Would you?”
I breathed out a laugh. My father, the master of stepping neatly around the centre of things. “Didn’t we cover this… eight weeks ago?”
I didn’t need to count. The length of a remand had a way of fixing itself in the mind.
Father adjusted the wires around his arm. “He asked whether you were seeing anyone.”
“And you told him?”
“That it wasn’t my place to speculate.”
I exhaled. “Magnanimous.”
“He strikes me as… attentive. Perhaps excessively so.”
The observation sat between us, neither accusation nor defence.
“I’m not looking to be arranged.” I went back to my case notes. “Not by you, not by Mother, and certainly not by Lord Wolfe.”
“I’d assumed as much.”
“Then why raise it?”
He considered that, drifting his gaze to the window. “Because attention from men like Adrian Wolfe is seldom incidental. And because, whether I like the shape of it or not, it would be… advantageous to you.”
“Advantageous?”
“Of course. And your mother is correct about one thing.”
I waited.
“You’ve been alone longer than you ordinarily permit yourself to be.”
The observation struck deeper than I allowed to show. Perhaps because it was accurate. My history hadn’t been one of abstinence. Far from it. Before Ollie, I bounced from one boy to the next. Then two years of investment begun at nineteen and undone in one decisive collapse. And after that… Razor.
A complication I refused to catalogue too closely.
I drew a steadying breath, closing my eyes, as if that might lock the thought away.
“I don’t have time for boyfriends.” The word stuck.
Not because it was untrue, but because it wasn’t the whole truth.
I had time. But that time was the problem.
In that the only prospective boyfriend I wanted possessed a disproportionate amount of it.
Years. A sentence measured in scrapes on a cell wall.
“And let’s not pretend we’ve forgotten that my last attempt—two full years—ended with a liar, a cheat, and an extravagant misuse of the Hale-Fitzroy seal of approval. ”
“Hm.” Father looked away. “Perhaps. But solitude, Tristan, much like ambition, tends to become a habit if left unexamined.”
I didn’t have the chance to respond before Father’s phone buzzed.
He glanced at it, frowned, then answered. “Charles Hale-Fitzroy.”
I went back to annotating a CPS update, highlighting a reference to intelligence that wasn’t attached to anything tangible. Sloppy. Or deliberate. I made a note to cross-check later.
My father listened in silence for a moment, expression merging from listening to…concerned.
“Yes,” he said eventually. “I’m aware.” Pause. “No, I don’t think that’s wise.”
I stilled. Then peered up under my lashes.
Not because of what he was saying, but the tone he was using.
That was his courtroom voice. The one he brought out when someone was trying to sell him a position he didn’t respect.
The same voice he’d used when I’d told him I wasn’t applying for pupillage and was taking another year instead. With Ollie.
To be fair, he’d been right. I had been wasting myself.
Still. Life had taken a rather violent turn since then.
“I understand the reasoning.” Irritation sharpened the edge of his voice, and he looked ready to rise from the chair, only the lines and wires preventing him. “But optics aren’t the same as justice.”
I made a show of not listening. It fooled no one, least of all me. My father didn’t take calls like this unless something important had gone wrong and I’d never had much talent for minding my own business.
“I’m not disputing the intelligence; I’m questioning the strategy.” Another pause. Longer this time.
I looked up.
He drifted his gaze to the window with that familiar internal calculus playing out behind his eyes.
“Yes,” he said finally. “Yes, I know who he is. Dropping active pursuit doesn’t make the problem disappear.
It just relocates it…I’m saying prolonged remand without charge is going to look very bad if this ever sees daylight.
You can’t simply allow it to drift because his solicitor has stepped back.
” Silence. Then, sharper: “That’s precisely why it needs managing.
If there’s no defence pressure, the optics worsen, not improve. ”
He listened again, jaw tightening.
“Yes. I understand resource constraints. I’m saying the absence of challenge invites scrutiny.” A beat. “Put interim cover in place. At least on paper. Temporary is fine.” Another pause. “No. Not a KC yet. That escalates it unnecessarily.” Then he ended the call with a clipped, “Keep me informed.”
The phone slipped from his hand onto the blanket, and he leant back in the chair, closing his eyes, as if the effort of the conversation had taken more from him than he cared to admit.
“Everything alright?” I asked, keeping my voice neutral.
“An ineffectual defence running scared,” he said dismissively. “Nothing more.”