Charlotte Ellis
I am unlocking the Petals and Promises door on a Saturday morning when Alexander's car pulls up outside, and the fact that he drove from London instead of calling tells me everything I need to know about what Richard Ames found.
The sign is still turned to CLOSED. Jess is not due for another hour.
The studio smells of cold water and green stems and the particular warmth of a space I have built with my own hands, and I am suddenly, fiercely glad that whatever is about to happen will happen here.
In my territory. Where the only performance required is the one I choose.
Alexander is out of the car before I can decide whether to pretend I have not seen him. He is wearing the grey sweater again. The one with the soft elbows. The one that makes him look like a man instead of an Earl.
He did not sleep. I can see it in the shadows under his eyes, in the way he holds himself. Like someone who spent the night reading documents that confirmed what he already suspected and wished he had been wrong.
I do not know when I start being able to read him from a distance.
From a van window the first morning, from across a ballroom, from a garden in the London dark.
It happened so gradually that I missed the moment it became true.
But I can see it now: the grey sweater and the careful stillness and the expression he wears when he is carrying something he has decided not to put down.
He has driven from London at dawn with a banker's box and a revelation he cannot say over the phone, and he is standing outside my door looking at me the way he looked at the eucalyptus stem I pressed into his hands in the ballroom.
Like I might be the thing that keeps him upright.
I do not know what to do with that. I step back and let him in.
The bell over the door chimes. Cheerful. Completely wrong for the weight in his shoulders. I lock the door behind him because I know without asking that this conversation requires privacy, and because the gesture of it, the click of the deadbolt, gives me something to do with my hands.
"You could have called," I say.
"I know." He stands in the middle of my workroom, surrounded by buckets of ranunculus and partially assembled arrangements and the general beautiful chaos of a Saturday morning before a wedding. He looks at all of it. At the space I have made. "I could not tell you this over the phone."
My chest tightens. "Tell me."
He crosses to the counter where I do my conditioning and leans against it, and the informality of the gesture, the way he has already learned where I stand when I work, does something to me that I do not have time to examine.
"Richard found the second name," he says. "On the authorisation to draft the ambiguous residence clause."
I set my keys down. Pick up a stem of ranunculus because I need to hold something. "Who?"
"Howard Calloway. My father's private secretary for nine years.
He retired to Provence six weeks after the codicil was filed.
" Alexander's voice is level, precise, the way it gets when he is managing something that would otherwise overwhelm him.
"Richard pulled the financial records this morning.
Calloway's retirement was funded by a private trust. The trust was established by my stepmother four months before the codicil was drafted. "
The ranunculus stem bends slightly under my grip. "She paid him."
"She paid him to help her insert a clause that would give her leverage over the entire estate.
Not for Sebastian. For herself." He looks at me, and his eyes are the colour of old whisky in the morning light.
"My father's illness began eighteen months before he died. She saw an opportunity. She took it."
I think about what he told me in the garden. About Sebastian not knowing. About what this knowledge would do to him.
"Does Sebastian still not know?"
"I do not believe so." Alexander pushes away from the counter and moves toward the window, toward the street outside where Oxford is waking up and going about its Saturday business.
"Sebastian thinks the codicil is his inheritance weapon.
He thinks he is fighting for something his mother wanted him to have.
He does not know she created it as insurance for herself.
That she was never planning to give him the estate. Only the ability to threaten it."
The cruelty of that lands on both of us at the same time. I set the stem down.
"His own mother," I say. "She used him."
"She has been using him for years. His resentment.
His ambition. His belief that he deserved what I was given.
" Alexander turns back to me, and there is something in his face I have not seen before.
Grief, maybe. Or the particular kind of anger that comes when you finally understand the full shape of someone's betrayal.
"He was never going to win. The codicil was designed to be challenged, not to succeed.
It was meant to keep me distracted. Keep me defending instead of noticing what she was actually doing. "
"Which was?"
"I do not know yet." He says it like the admission costs him. "But Richard is pulling every document connected to her personal finances for the last six years. Whatever she was positioning herself for, we will find it."
I watch him standing there in my workroom, surrounded by my flowers and my tools and the evidence of the life I have built, and I think about what it means that he came here. Not to his solicitor's office. Not to Ashford House. Here.
"What happens to Sebastian when he finds out?"
Alexander goes still. The particular stillness I have learned to recognise as something important happening underneath. "I do not know. I have been trying to decide whether it is kinder to tell him or to let him lose without knowing why."
"Those are not your only options."
He looks at me.
"You could tell him the truth," I say. "All of it. And let him decide what to do with it."
"He will hate me."
"He might." I cross the workroom to stand closer to him, close enough to smell the soap he uses, clean and green like cut grass.
"He might also hate his mother. Or himself for not seeing it.
Or no one, because grief is strange and people process betrayal in ways you cannot predict.
" I look up at him. "But he deserves to know.
Even if it destroys him. Even if he blames you for telling him. "
Alexander does not respond for a long moment. His eyes move over my face like he is memorising something, cataloguing details he might need later.
"You are not afraid of difficult truths," he says finally. "Are you?"
"I am terrified of them. I just do not think avoiding them helps."
Something shifts in his expression. A crack in the careful control he has been maintaining since he walked through my door. "Charlotte."
The way he says my name. Like it means something different than it did an hour ago. Like he has been turning it over in his mind and found new edges.
"I have spent ten years learning to manage information," he says.
"Learning to decide what people needed to know and when they needed to know it.
I told myself it was protection. I told myself I was being careful.
" He takes a step closer, and the workroom shrinks around us.
"I was lying to myself. I was afraid. Of being known.
Of being seen as something other than what I presented. "
"I know."
"You do, do not you?" He is close enough now that I can see the pulse at his throat, the tension in his jaw, the effort it is costing him to say these things out loud. "You have seen through me since the first day. When you corrected my chandelier placement and did not apologise for being right."
I laugh. Cannot help it. The sound is too loud in the quiet studio, but it breaks something between us. Some final wall that has been standing since the garden.
"I was terrified," I admit. "You were an Earl with opinions about ranunculus. I was a florist from Oxford who did not know the rules."
"There are no rules." His hand comes up, hovers near my face without touching. "That is what I have been trying to tell myself. That is what I have been too afraid to believe."
I wait. Do not move. Do not breathe.
His fingers brush my cheek. Just barely. The lightest possible contact. And then his hand is in my hair, cradling my skull, and he is looking at me with something that might be wonder and might be terror and is probably both.
"I am going to tell Sebastian the truth," he says. "All of it. Today, if I can reach him. Because you are right. He deserves to know. And because I am tired of being the person who decides what other people can handle."
My heart is doing something complicated in my chest. Not quite racing. More like rearranging itself to make room for something new.
"Good," I say.
"And then I am going to show you Richard's file.
Everything. Every document. Every theory.
Every piece of evidence we have assembled.
" His thumb traces my cheekbone. "Because you are part of this now.
Because I want you to be part of this. And because I have spent three weeks learning that you are better at finding the truth than anyone I have ever met. "
I think about the probate court contact. About Diane Forsythe's husband. About the threads I pulled that led Richard to Howard Calloway's trust fund.
"I had good instincts," I say.
"You had excellent instincts. And you did not ask permission to use them." His mouth curves. Almost a smile. "It is one of the things I find most terrifying about you."
"Only one of them?"
"The list is extensive."
I put my hand on his chest. Feel his heartbeat, steady and strong, beneath my palm. "You are not so frightening yourself, you know. Once you stop trying to be."
"I am an Earl with opinions about ranunculus."