Part 2
“Don’t lie to me,” Claire said.
“I’m not lying.”
“You were here.”
“I was not.”
Her screen flickered. Another call came through, interrupting him.
DANIEL MERCER CALLING.
Claire stared at the name.
Her father heard the change in her breathing.
“Don’t answer that.”
She closed her eyes.
The phone rang once.
Twice.
Three times.
“Claire,” Malcolm said sharply. “Do not answer him.”
That was when she understood something was wrong with the order of fear inside him.
If Daniel had hurt her, her father should have been telling her to call for help. He should have been asking whether the doors were locked, whether she could get to a neighbor, whether she could reach the security desk downstairs.
Instead, he sounded like a man trying to keep a conversation from happening.
Claire pressed accept.
For one moment, the screen went black.
Then Daniel appeared.
He was sitting in his office, though the word office had always felt too plain for the room he kept on the top floor of the Vale building. Dark wood walls. A polished desk. Open files under the soft amber light of a brass lamp. He wore a charcoal suit and a pale shirt, his tie loosened but still knotted. His dark hair was in place, though not perfectly. One hand held his phone. The other was braced against the desk.
He looked exhausted.
He looked frightened.
And he looked nothing like a man who had just hurt someone.
That did not make Claire trust him.
“Claire.” His voice came through clear and measured. “Can you hear me?”
Her father’s call had not disconnected. His face sat in a smaller square in the corner of the screen.
“Daniel,” Malcolm said.
Daniel did not look surprised to hear him.
That frightened Claire more than either of their voices.
“Why are you both on this call?” she asked.
Daniel’s eyes dropped for a fraction of a second.
“I called your father when I couldn’t reach you.”
“That’s not what I asked.”
“Claire,” her father said, “hang up.”
“No,” Daniel said at the same time.
The two men went silent.
Claire felt something cold move through her, separate from the marble beneath her cheek. For years, they had been careful around each other. Daniel had spoken to Malcolm with professional restraint. Malcolm had treated Daniel with the polished contempt he reserved for men he believed were trying too hard to impress him. They had never raised their voices. They had never openly fought.
But now their silence felt practiced.
Like a door being held shut from both sides.
“What happened to you?” Daniel asked.
Claire looked at him.
“You tell me.”
His jaw tightened. “I wasn’t there.”
Her father’s eyes lifted sharply.
Daniel heard it too. “You were?”
“No,” Malcolm said.
Claire’s breathing caught.
No one spoke.
Daniel leaned forward over his desk. “Claire, did you find the folder?”
Her body went still.
The pain did not disappear. The room did not change. But something inside her stopped moving.
Her father’s face hardened.
“Daniel,” Malcolm said quietly.
Claire stared at the screen.
“What folder?”
Daniel did not answer.
Malcolm did.
“Claire, he has been manipulating you.”
Daniel looked at him then. His expression was not angry at first. It was worse than angry. It was tired.
“Don’t do that,” he said.
“Do what?”
“Talk to her as if she isn’t on the call.”
Claire’s fingers trembled around the phone.
The folder.
She had seen it earlier that night.
Not opened it, not fully. Just the corner of a thick brown envelope beneath a stack of papers on the low table beside the window. Her name had been written on it in Daniel’s handwriting.
CLAIRE.
Nothing else.
She had thought it was another version of the life they had been trying to build together. Papers about the apartment they had talked about buying downtown. A note. A surprise. Something romantic and stupidly expensive, the sort of thing Daniel did rarely but well.
She had almost smiled when she saw it.
Then the argument began.
Not all at once. That was the strange thing. There had been no clean moment when the night turned.
Her father had arrived late, after dinner, with his cane in one hand and rain on his coat. Daniel had been standing by the windows with a drink he had barely touched. Claire had been trying to decide whether to say something about the envelope. Malcolm had kissed her cheek, noticed the wine, and asked why Daniel was still there.
The question had sounded casual.
It had not been casual.
Daniel said he was waiting for Claire.
Malcolm said, “At eleven-thirty?”
May you like
Daniel answered, “Yes.”
Claire remembered the way both men looked at her after that, as though she had become the subject of a conversation they had started long before she walked into the room.
