Loose ends

Chapter 21

Loose Ends

Ethan was still sitting across from Robert Ashby when his phone screen lit up on the table beside him.

He glanced at it without picking it up.

Elena.

He let it go.

Then it lit up again almost immediately.

Same name.

He looked at Robert, who gave a small nod that said, “Go ahead,” without actually saying anything.

Ethan picked up the phone and stepped to the far side of the room.

“Elena.”

Her voice came back tight and controlled, the way it always was when she was trying not to sound alarmed.

“Where are you right now?”

“Why?”

“Because Richard Blackwood called the office an hour ago asking for your location, and when I told him I did not know, he did not believe me. He sent someone here, Ethan. To the office. At this hour.”

A pause.

“They went through your private files.”

Ethan’s jaw tightened.

“Did they take anything?”

“I do not know yet. I managed to pull the most sensitive folders before they got to them, but I cannot be certain about everything.”

Her voice dropped slightly.

“There is something else. Something I should have told you sooner, and I did not because I was not sure whose side I was supposed to be on.”

He turned slightly away from Robert.

“Say it.”

“The recording from the hospital,” Elena said. “The one from the corridor outside Judith’s room three weeks ago. I have a copy of it.”

Everything in Ethan went still.

“What recording?”

“Dan and Juliana. Someone placed a device in that corridor before their conversation. I do not know who placed it originally, but a copy found its way to me through your father’s office.”

She exhaled slowly.

“Ethan, what is on that recording is not just about Judith or the marriage. Dan is on there talking about transactions. Names. Things he was involved in before he came back to London that your father has clearly been holding onto.”

A pause.

“Your father was not just using it against Dan. He was planning to use it against you. To show that you knew. That you were complicit.”

“I did not know anything about Dan’s transactions.”

“I know that. But the recording is edited, Ethan. Selectively. The version your father has makes it sound like you did.”

He stood very still in the corner of that small room, with Robert Ashby sitting quietly at the table behind him, and the full shape of his father’s plan becoming clear in a way that made his stomach turn.

His father was not just going after Judith.

He was going after all of them at once.

“Where is the original recording?” Ethan said.

“That is what I have been trying to find out.”

“Find it,” he said. “Do not tell anyone you have the copy. Do not go back to the office tonight. Go home and lock your door, and call me if anything feels wrong.”

He ended the call and stood there for a moment before turning back to Robert.

The older man was watching him with those steady, unhurried eyes.

“Your father moves fast when he decides to,” Robert said simply.

“Yes,” Ethan said.

He sat back down.

“Tell me everything you know about a recording made at Harley Street Hospital three weeks ago.”

Robert looked at him for a long moment.

Then he reached into the folder and pulled out one more page.

Across the city, Dan’s phone rang.

He looked at the screen, and something changed in his face.

Judith noticed it immediately.

The way his shoulders shifted slightly.

The careful way he picked up the phone and angled the screen away from her before he stood.

Juliana.

Judith recognised the particular stillness that came over a person when they were trying to decide how to handle two things at once.

“Take it,” she said, without looking up from the notepad.

He hesitated.

“Dan.”

She looked up at him.

“Take the call. I am not going anywhere.”

He nodded once and walked down the hallway toward the front door, answering as he went.

She could not hear his words from where she sat.

Just the low register of his voice.

Careful.

Measured.

The tone of a man managing something delicate.

She looked back down at the notepad.

Third person.

She tapped the pen against the page and thought about what Dan had said.

The care his father had taken, even in a private conversation, saying this person’s name.

The way that kind of care only existed when someone had real power over you.

Not just money.

Not just influence.

The deeper kind of power that came from knowing things about a person that they could never afford to have known.

She heard Dan’s voice shift slightly down the hallway.

Still low, but with an edge in it now.

She did not strain to listen.

She just sat with her own thoughts and the notepad and the names on the page and the growing feeling that what she and Dan were building between them on this table tonight was only one part of a much larger picture being assembled simultaneously in rooms across this city that she could not see.

After a few minutes, Dan came back.

He sat down slowly and put his phone face down on the table.

Judith looked at him and waited.

“That was Juliana,” he said.

“I know.”

He looked at her carefully.

“She has been contacted by someone claiming to have a recording of a conversation she and I had at the hospital three weeks ago. They are threatening to release it unless she gives them information about you.”

He paused.

“About your movements. Where you are staying. Lily’s routine.”

Judith felt the cold move through her chest but kept her face even.

“What is on the recording?” she said.

Dan was quiet for a moment too long.

“Dan.”

Her voice was firm.

“What is on it?”

He looked at her steadily.

“Things from before I came back to London. Business decisions I made when I was trying to keep the European company alive after my father gutted it. Things I am not proud of, and things I cannot fully defend.”

He held her gaze.

“I am not going to sit here and tell you my hands are clean. They are not. But I need you to know that nothing I did was directed at you or your family. And none of it changes what I am trying to do right now.”

Judith looked at him for a long moment.

She thought about clean hands and dirty ones and the particular impossibility of finding anyone in this entire situation who had not made choices they could not fully defend.

She thought about her own choices.

The contract she had signed.

The lies she had told her mother.

The years she had spent protecting a secret that had cost everyone around her in ways she was still discovering.

Nobody in this story had clean hands.

That did not mean nobody was worth trusting.

“Is Juliana safe?” she said.

Dan looked at her but did not answer straight away.

“For now.”

“Then call her back,” Judith said. “Tell her not to give them anything. Tell her we are going to deal with this.”

She picked up the pen.

“And then sit back down because we are not finished.”

Dan looked at her for a moment.,Dan pulled his chair back in and picked up his pen and sat back down