บททั้งหมดของ Tempted by my brother-in-law. : บทที่ 111 - บทที่ 120

Chapter 111ARRIVALSPOV: NikolaiWe got to the airport in twenty minutes.Kaden had texted the terminal and the specific arrivals area and I drove and Hazel sat beside me and neither of us said much because there was not much that needed saying. My father was in a building twenty minutes away after ten years of being in a building four hours away and the gap between those two things was not something conversation could bridge before we got there.We parked and went inside.The arrivals hall was the specific organised chaos of a Friday afternoon, people with signs and people without signs, families in clusters, the particular energy of a space designed entirely around the moment of someone coming back.Kaden was near the barrier.He was standing very still in the way he stood when he was holding something significant and needed his body not to show it. He saw us and raised his hand slightly.We went to him.He looked at me."He is just through there," he said. "He collected his bag. H

FOURTHPOV: HazelShe had a letter.Not documentation. Not field notes. Not financial records.A letter.Written by Margaret to the Varyn family, addressed not to any specific person but to the family as a whole, given to a woman named Elsa who had been Margaret's neighbour in the city before the mountain, who was now eighty seven years old and had kept it in a box in her flat for sixty years because Margaret had said keep this until someone comes looking and Elsa had kept it because she was the kind of person who did what she said she would do.Nikolai asked her to stay where she was.He asked for her address and she gave it and he said we are two hours out and she said she would be awake, she did not sleep much anymore, age had that effect.We drove.The city came back toward us out of the dark and Nikolai drove and I sat beside him and thought about what a letter to the family meant. Not to him specifically. Not to Kaden or Vera or Arthur. To the family. The whole structure of it.

Chapter 115RIDGEPOV: HazelWe went the next morning.Just us, the way Nikolai had said. No investigators, no family, no calls unless something was urgent enough to justify breaking the agreement we had made at the dinner table without saying it out loud.The city was doing its Saturday morning thing when we drove through it, slower than weekdays, the streets having a different quality of purpose, and the ridge road took us up and out of the density of it into the part of the city that was not quite city anymore.The house was at the end of the street the same way it had been yesterday.But yesterday we had gone there as buyers and today we went as the people it belonged to and that was a different kind of arriving.Nikolai had the key.Vera had given it to him last night before we left, produced it from her cardigan pocket as if she had been carrying it for some time, which she probably had, and handed it to him without ceremony and gone back to her chair.He unlocked the front door

Chapter 117GENEVAPOV: HazelHer name was Dr Claire Osei.She was fifty three and she had flown overnight from Geneva with two clinic directors and a folder of twenty years of research and she was sitting in the estate library at eleven in the morning with the specific energy of someone who had been waiting to be in exactly this room and was not going to waste the time now that she was in it.She looked at the folder of Margaret's documentation on the table.She had not touched it yet.She was looking at it the way you looked at something you had been approaching from a long way away."Rajan Anand told me about a compound," she said. "In a conference in nineteen ninety four. He was already ill by then and he knew it and he was trying to get the information out before he could not." She looked at her hands. "He said he had found something on a mountain with a colleague who was no longer alive. He said the colleague had found the secondary application first and had documented it but th

Chapter 119SEALEDPOV: NikolaiThe Law Society archive was in a basement too.A different basement, climate controlled, the kind of facility that took the preservation of paper seriously rather than as an afterthought, and the woman who met us there had been told the broad shape of why a forty year old box from a dissolved chambers had become significant and was treating the whole thing with appropriate gravity.The box was on a table in a small viewing room.Plain. Sealed with tape that had gone brittle with age. The note on the outside in handwriting that was not Margaret's, which meant a solicitor or clerk had written the receipt instructions after she sent it.Open when the time is right.And you will know when that is.I looked at it for a long moment.Hazel was beside me. Kaden on my other side. The two investigators standing slightly back, giving us the room the way they had given us the room at every significant moment in this investigation, understanding that some things nee