4. Charly
— ? —
Charly
Consciousness comes back in blurry fragments.
My eyes land on the ceiling first. White, unfamiliar, too high to be mine.
Then the weight of something soft tucked around my shoulders, a jacket that cost more than anything in my closet, smelling of cedar and warm skin.
Then the hum of the air and the far-off sound of city traffic through glass windows that have probably never been opened.
Then the memories all come back, and I wish it hadn’t.
Adam’s mouth at my ear. I’m sorry, I can’t do this.
Rebecca’s hand on her stomach. My father shouting while two men held him back.
The applause chasing me out the door like I’d won something instead of lost everything.
Not one of them understanding they were applauding the worst thing that ever happened to me.
My stomach turns over. I press the back of my hand to my mouth until it passes.
I sit up too fast and the room tips sideways.
“Slow down.” A hand catches my shoulder before I can pitch forward and eases me back against the headboard. “You’ve been out almost two hours. You scared the hell out of me in the car, I couldn’t get you to respond. I almost took you to the ER.”
Clarence.
He’s in an armchair pulled close enough to catch me if I go down again, sleeves shoved up to his elbows, tie gone, looking like he walked out of the wedding and straight into a fight he’s still having in his head.
“Where am I?”
“A hotel. Somewhere they won’t think to look for you.” He reads whatever’s on my face. “Adam doesn’t know about this place. You’re safe.”
Safe. I turn the word over in my head, waiting for it to make sense.
I’m in a hotel I don’t recognize, half-wrapped in the jacket of a man I’ve barely spoken to in three years, who shares a last name with the person who just destroyed me.
And yet. The way he says it gives me a slight comfort, like he’d fight anyone who walked through that door.
Something in me unclenches. Just a little.
“How long have you been sitting there?”
“The whole time.”
“That’s a little unsettling.”
“You’ve been through hell in the last three hours. I wasn’t going anywhere.” His gaze tracks over me, clinical, assessing. “How’s your head? Scale of one to ten. And don’t lie to make me feel better.”
“I’m a nurse. I know how to check myself.”
“Fine. Suit yourself.” He leans back in the chair, arms folded, watching me with something that might be amusement or might be concern, hard to tell with him, and I don’t have the energy to fight him.
It strikes me, suddenly, how little he resembles Adam.
Same parents, same modest house they grew up in, completely different outcome.
Adam got the easy smile, the golden retriever energy, the charm that made everyone feel like his best friend, and somehow stayed broke doing it.
Clarence got cheekbones that could cut glass, an expression that says figure it out yourself, and the kind of money you build by hand and never talk about.
I close my eyes for a second, take stock the way I would with a patient.
“I feel fuzzy,” I say, mostly to myself. “Like everything’s happening behind glass.”
“Your adrenaline’s crashing, must be that. Give it a few more minutes.” He shifts forward in the chair, elbows on his knees. “Everyone’s been calling. I let it ring.”
“You answered my phone?”
“I silenced it. It was getting annoying.” The ghost of something crosses his face. “Figured you’d earned a few hours of sleep after what just happened.”
“I need to see it.”
He reaches into his jacket, slow, and sets my phone and clutch between us. His hand lingers near mine for half a second longer than necessary.
“Whatever’s on there, it can wait until you’re ready.”
“I’ll never be ready. That’s the point.”
The screen lights up and the numbers make my stomach roll. Fifty-three missed calls. A wall of texts. I ignore all of it and open my bank instead, because the cold thing crawling up my spine got there before the thought did.
It takes three tries to get my password right.
The account loads.
Eight hundred and forty-seven dollars.
The room goes very far away.
“What’s wrong?”
“It’s gone.” My voice comes out scraped down to nothing.
“All of it. He moved everything I had into one account three months ago, told me to trust him, and he emptied it. Last week. Before the wedding.” A sound comes out of me that isn’t a laugh.
“He cleaned me out before he humiliated me. What the fuck is wrong with your brother?”
Clarence takes the phone, looks, and goes completely still. When he speaks his voice has dropped somewhere low and quiet and frightening.
“That was never about the house.” It comes out almost to himself. “He needed it. He’s always needed somebody else’s money to be the man he pretends to be.”
“Get in line, Carrington. He’s my problem.”
“He’s been my problem a lot longer than he’s been yours.”
It comes out before he can stop it. I watch him hear his own words, watch something flicker across his face, there and gone, a door swinging shut a half-second too late.
The silence that follows has a weight. For a moment I think he’s going to say more, crack open whatever’s locked behind that expression.
He doesn’t.
“Old news.” He looks away, jaw tight. “Family stuff. None of it matters right now.”
“That’s a very long way of saying you hate your brother.”
His eyes come back to mine. Something shifts in them, not anger, not quite. Something older. Tired.
“I don’t hate Adam.” He says it like he’s said it before, to himself, late at night, trying to make it true. “I stopped expecting anything from him a long time ago. There’s a difference.” A pause. His mouth twists, barely. “He taught me that one himself.”
He doesn’t say anything else about Adam.
He doesn’t reassure me, doesn’t theorize, doesn’t tell me what any of it means.
He just looks at the dark phone screen for a moment, jaw set, like a man filing something away for later, and the quiet of it unsettles me more than anything he could have said out loud.
“You said three months.” It isn’t quite a question. His voice has gone very even. “He had you sign it over three months ago?”
“Yeah. Why?”
Whatever that means to him, he doesn’t let me see it. He just nods once, slow, and goes quiet again, and I get the strange feeling he’s already somewhere I can’t follow him to.
I should feel the whole thing crash down on me now. The rage, the grief, the urge to scream the room apart. Instead the glass comes down again, merciful, and I let it, because the other option is feeling all of it at once, and I’m not sure I’d come back up if I did.
He’s still doing it. Sitting there with that shut, working quiet on his face, looking at me and past me at the same time. I can feel myself being added up. Filed. Handled.
“Stop that.”
He blinks. It’s the first thing I’ve surprised out of him all night. “Stop what?”
“That. Whatever you’re doing behind your face.” It comes out of me ragged, scraping up from somewhere I usually keep locked, and I let it, because he’s the nearest Carrington and I’m not feeling picky about my aim right now. “You’re already working out how to fix me. That is not what I need.”
“Charly, that’s not what I’m doing.”
“No, let me say it. I don’t even know where to start with this.
I haven’t grieved it yet. My sister was sleeping with your brother, and I haven’t even had a minute to feel that.
” My voice cracks straight down the middle, and I shove it back into line.
“You want to know the worst part? I used to be glad about how close they were. The two people I loved most in the world, and they liked each other, and I thought I was the luckiest girl alive. The whole time they were laughing at me.”
He doesn’t say anything. He just lets me have it.
“So whatever you’re cooking up in there, stop. I have to be the one who gets myself out of this. I need time to think. And I do not want the way out handed to me by a Carrington.”
It lands. He takes it.
He doesn’t flinch, and he doesn’t argue, and he doesn’t do the wounded thing a guilty man does. He just holds my eyes, steady, while all of it sits in the air between us, and somehow being looked at like that is harder than being left alone would be.
“Okay. You’re right.” He says it quietly, and it isn’t surrender. It’s closer to respect. “No plan. No fixing. It isn’t mine to fix, and you don’t owe a single Carrington your trust tonight. Me least of all.”
He sits back, finally, giving me the room I asked for before I have to ask twice.
“Take all the time you need. Think it through, decide what you want, do it your own way. I’m not going to hand you a way out, because you didn’t ask for one and you don’t need one from me.
” He pauses, and his voice drops lower. “But I’m not leaving you alone in a hotel tonight either.
I’ll be on the other side of that door. You don’t have to talk to me.
You don’t have to thank me. The second you want me gone, I’m gone. That’s all I’ve got.”
It’s the only thing he could have said that I don’t have an answer for. And he knows it, too. I can tell by the way the corner of his mouth moves, like he’s already figured out exactly how to handle me and isn’t the least bit sorry about it.
I hate that it works. I hate that the space he just gave me is the first thing all day that’s let me breathe.
I don’t have an answer for that. So I pick up the phone instead and do the only thing that feels like control.
I block Rebecca’s phone number. Then Adam. Then I sit with my thumb over my mother’s name for a long moment, and block her number too.
“Your mom?”
“She’ll just take Rebecca’s side. She always does.” I set the phone face down on the blanket and push it away. “I can’t deal with her today. Maybe not ever.”
“Your dad?”
“Yeah.” I pick it back up. “Him I can call.”
He answers before the first ring even finishes.
“Charly? Oh, thank God. Where are you, are you hurt? Just tell me where you are and I’m coming.”