Semua Bab OFF LIMITS: Bab 21 - Bab 30

CHAPTER TWENTY ONE POV: Damon She came through the door at 9:47PM. He knew because he’d been watching the clock since she’d hung up. Standing in the hallway of Daniel’s flat with his phone in his hand and Marcus behind him pretending not to watch and Leila at the kitchen table pretending not to listen. She came in and looked at him immediately. Her face told him something was wrong before anything else did. Not wrong like danger. Wrong like weight. Like she was carrying something she’d picked up for him because he couldn’t carry it himself yet. “Living room,” she said. Quietly. “Just you and me.” Marcus started to say something. “Marcus,” she said. Just his name. The way she said it when she needed him to love her by stepping back. He stepped back. She closed the living room door. Sat on the couch. He sat across from her on the coffee table because he couldn’t be further than that. She had documents in her hand. Folded. She held them for a moment without giving them to hi

CHAPTER TWENTY THREE POV: Zara She didn’t think about it until Tuesday. Monday had been too full. The meeting and Leila leaving and Marcus and the restaurant where he’d spent forty minutes interrogating the menu while Camille quietly ordered for everyone and it had been exactly right. Tuesday morning she woke up in Daniel’s flat on the pullout couch and stared at the ceiling and thought about Ryan. Not the camera. Not Osei. Not the two years that had been built on something she hadn’t fully understood. Just Ryan. The person. The man who had sat across from her in a bar in Southwark and said meeting you was real with the specific steadiness of someone saying the truest thing they knew how to say. She believed him. That was the complicated part. She believed the feelings had been real even while the circumstances had been constructed. She believed he’d loved her in whatever broken way he was capable of while simultaneously being something she’d never fully known. She believed

CHAPTER TWENTY FIVE POV: Marcus He’d been holding it for a week. Not the anger. The anger had moved through him fast and loud the way anger always did with Marcus, present and total and then gone, leaving something quieter behind. Not forgiveness exactly. Something that came before forgiveness. The place you stood while you were deciding what forgiveness was going to cost you and whether you could afford it. He’d been standing in that place for a week. They came back from Edinburgh on Saturday evening. He heard the door. Heard Zara’s voice in the hallway and Damon’s underneath it. Heard the specific quality of two people who had been through something together and had come back changed by it in a way that was visible even in the way they moved through a doorway. He was in the kitchen. He stayed in the kitchen. Let them come to him. Zara came in first. She looked at him. He looked at her. Something passed between them that was old and sibling and didn’t need words. “Good tri

CHAPTER TWENTY SEVENPOV: DamonThree months looked like this.Sunday dinners that ran too long because Marcus always had more to say. Zara’s things appearing in his flat in the way that someone’s things appeared when neither person had made a decision but both people had made a decision, her reading glasses on his nightstand, her specific brand of tea in his cupboard, two of her jumpers on the chair by the window that she claimed was temporary and had been there for six weeks.Phone calls with Isla every Thursday. Not scheduled. Just… Thursday had become the day. She’d call or he’d call and they’d talk about Edinburgh and architecture and occasionally about Sandra and occasionally about Clara and it was always heavy and always worth it.Daniel. Regularly. The investigation moving through its channels with the slow certainty of something built properly.And Osei.Osei who had not been charged yet but who was being circled by something that had his name on it. Whose assets were frozen.

CHAPTER TWENTY NINE POV: Damon The letter arrived on a Friday. Not a text this time. Not a message through a lawyer or a submission through the court. An actual letter. Physical. Handwritten. Posted from an address in Edinburgh that Damon didn’t recognise and that turned out, when Daniel checked, to belong to a hospice on the outskirts of the city. He sat with it unopened for two hours. On the kitchen table in his flat. The flat that now had Zara’s reading glasses on the nightstand and her tea in the cupboard and two of her jumpers on the chair that were still technically temporary. He sat across from the letter and drank his coffee and looked at the handwriting on the front and didn’t open it. He called Zara at 9. She answered immediately. She always answered immediately which was something he’d noticed and never said out loud because saying it out loud would make him examine why it mattered so much and he wasn’t ready for that examination. “There’s a letter,” he said. A pau