SINFUL ACQUISITIONS のすべてのチャプター: チャプター 81 - チャプター 90

POV: MARA KADEThe Royal Marsden is on the Fulham Road. Twenty minutes by cab if the traffic cooperates. I know this because I looked it up at half past six this morning while Adrian was still asleep, which tells me something about where the decision already was even then, well before I told myself I had until tonight to be certain.I call Jenna on the way.She answers before the second ring, which means she was already awake and already waiting. She knows me well enough to have been doing both."You are going," she says. Not a question."Yes," I say."Now.""Now. Before I think about it long enough to make it into something larger than it needs to be."A pause. The pause of Jenna deciding how much of what she is thinking to say and in what order. "How do you feel?""I will tell you after," I say. "I do not know yet.""Are you taking Adrian?""No. This one is mine.""Good," she says, which surprises me slightly. "It should be. No one else in the room for this one." She pauses. "Call m

POV: MARA KADEElara calls back within forty minutes.I am at the kitchen table with my second coffee and Adrian is at the window with his phone and the silence between us has the quality of two people who have agreed not to fill a room with words it does not yet need."I have spoken to Margaret," Elara says when I put her on speaker. "She has told me exactly what Richard's intermediary said to her. And I have thought about it carefully." A pause. The pause of a woman who thinks about everything with more rigour than most people bring to anything. "A private letter between brothers, if it exists, does not change the fraud evidence. The subsidiary accounts are documented. The transfers are documented. The pattern is documented and Forsythe's testimony stands on its own regardless of anything Edward Vale wrote privately to Richard." Another pause. "What it could change is the narrative. If Richard's version of that letter suggests that your father's private feelings about the fraud were

POV: MARA KADEAdrian is in the study when I get home.The door is open, which means he is not managing anything. He looks up when I come in and I can read his face before he says a word. Something has happened. Not bad exactly. The specific quality of a man who has received information that changes the shape of tomorrow and is still working out what to do with it."Tell me," I say."Whitmore called," he says.I stop in the doorway."David Whitmore," I say."Yes."I come in. I sit in the chair across from his desk. "What did he say.""He was with my father the week he wrote both of them," Adrian says. "The legal letter he gave to Whitmore for safekeeping and the private letter Edward sent directly to Richard as his brother. Not a legal document. Never intended for a courtroom. Never shown to anyone at the time." He pauses. "Whitmore did not read the private one. My father sealed it himself. But he told Whitmore what he had written. What he said to Richard and why.""What did he say to

POV: MARA KADEWe do not go straight home.Adrian asks if I want to walk and I say yes without hesitating because I can read what he needs and what he needs is the city and the air and the time between the conference room and the penthouse to let the morning settle before he opens that envelope.We walk along the Embankment. The Thames beside us grey and patient. The city going about its ordinary business in the way it always does, entirely indifferent to what happened in a room twenty minutes ago.Adrian is carrying the envelope in his hand.Not in his coat pocket. Not in his case. In his hand. The way you carry something you are not ready to put down yet but are not ready to open either.I do not comment on it.We walk."What are you thinking," I say after a while."I am thinking about what Whitmore said," he says. "That my father still believed Richard could choose right. Even then." He pauses. "I built twenty years of walls on the lesson that trust makes you vulnerable. That the p

POV: MARA KADEWe go to Margaret on Wednesday.Elara gives us her address. A flat in Kensington, the top floor of a period building on a quiet street that has the particular quality of old money that does not announce itself. Adrian calls ahead. Margaret says come at eleven and I will have coffee ready and do not bring anything.We do not bring anything.She opens the door herself. She is smaller than I remember from the courtroom, or perhaps the courtroom made her larger. She is in a dark blue dress and her hair is silver and precise and she looks at both of us with the sharp, unhurried attention of a woman who spent four years in a clinic being underestimated and has no intention of allowing that to continue."Come in," she says.The flat is ordered and quiet. Bookshelves on every wall. A writing desk by the window with papers stacked neatly and a pen laid across them. The particular atmosphere of a space that belongs entirely to its occupant, that has been arranged according to no