Charlotte Ellis #2
"Today. An hour ago. He showed me something."
More silence. I can hear him breathing. Hear the sound of him not managing me, not rushing to explain, just waiting.
"An email chain." I say it flatly. "Between you and someone at Fairfax Holdings. Discussing a preliminary valuation of the estate. Dated six weeks ago."
"That email chain doesn't exist."
"I saw it, Alexander."
"You saw something Sebastian created to look like it existed.
" His voice is still soft but there is an edge underneath now.
"I have never communicated directly with anyone at Fairfax Holdings.
Every approach they've made has gone through Richard.
Every response has been a refusal. I have the correspondence. You've seen the correspondence."
"Then explain February twelfth."
A pause. Longer this time.
"February twelfth." He sounds like he is searching his memory. "I met with Richard. We reviewed the codicil documentation. I drove back to London and had dinner with Oliver."
"Did you meet with anyone else?"
"No."
"Did you go anywhere near a solicitor's office in Mayfair?"
"Richard's office is in Lincoln's Inn. You've seen the address."
I close my eyes. The van is cold. I should have turned on the heat.
"Sebastian said you would lie."
"Sebastian needs me to be lying." Alexander's voice has lost its edge.
Now it just sounds tired. "He needs the email chain to be real because if it isn't, then the evidence he submitted to the trustees is forged, and his entire legal position collapses.
He is fighting for his claim, Charlotte. He will say whatever he has to say."
"And you?"
"What about me?"
"What would you say to keep me?"
The silence that follows is the longest yet. I can hear traffic through the van windows. Hear my own heartbeat. Hear the particular quality of Alexander not speaking while he decides how to answer.
"I would tell you the truth." His voice is very quiet.
"I would tell you that I have made mistakes.
That I have withheld things I should not have withheld.
That I spent so long managing information I forgot how to simply share it.
But I would not lie to you. Not about Fairfax.
Not about February twelfth. Not about anything that matters. "
I want to believe him.
I want to believe him so badly it scares me.
"Charlotte." He says my name differently now. Carefully. Like it might break. "Come to London tomorrow. I'll show you everything I have. Every document, every email, every piece of correspondence Richard has ever sent on my behalf. And then you can decide for yourself what you believe."
I think about the email chain on Sebastian's table. The photograph. The specific doubt planted like a seed.
I think about Alexander's hands on my face. The way he asked me to stay. The way he stopped deciding what I could handle when I demanded it.
"Tomorrow." I say it before I can talk myself out of it. "I'll be there by ten."
"Thank you."
I end the call and sit in the cold van for a long time. Then I go into my shop and put on the lights and begin conditioning stems I do not need to condition, because my hands need something to do while my mind tries to figure out what is true.
Jess finds me three hours later, sitting on the workroom floor surrounded by buckets of ranunculus.
"You look terrible." She locks the door behind her. Crosses to where I sit. Lowers herself to the floor beside me with the particular grace of someone who has done this before. "What happened?"
I show her Sebastian's email chain. The photograph. The specific, detailed doubt that has been growing in my chest all afternoon.
She reads it twice. Sets it down.
"This is fake." She says it simply. "The formatting is wrong."
"What?"
"Look at the timestamp." She points. "It says fourteen hundred hours. Alexander doesn't use twenty-four-hour time. I've seen his texts to you. He writes two PM. Like a normal person."
I stare at the email chain. At the timestamp I did not think to check.
"Sebastian made one mistake." Jess hands the paper back to me.
"He made Alexander too formal. Too perfect.
The real Alexander leaves his coat on chairs and forgets to eat lunch and texts you three times in a row when he could have sent one message.
The Alexander in this email is a character.
A construct. And whoever wrote it has never actually met him. "
The doubt in my chest does not disappear. But it shifts. Settles into something different.
"I need to talk to him." I say it to myself. "I need to see his files. I need..."
"You need to stop looking for reasons to doubt him and start trusting what you already know." Jess puts her hand on my arm. "Charlotte. That man drove to Oxford at dawn to show you documents proving his own stepmother committed fraud. That is not the behaviour of someone who lies to you."
She is right.
I know she is right.
But the email chain is still sitting in my lap, and the photograph is still burned into my memory, and tomorrow I will drive to London and look at every piece of evidence Alexander has, and only then will I know for certain.
Only then.