Chapter 596:

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“So,” Lochlan said carefully, “you’re accepting me not because you love me, or want to spend the rest of your life with me, but because I’d be useful.”

I nodded. “Are you okay with that?”

His face fell for a moment, and my heart dropped with it.

“But I’m willing to take what I can get,” he said, “and work with it.”

“Oh.” I breathed out. “All right, then.”

𝘍𝗶𝗻d 𝘯o𝘃𝗲𝗅 PD𝗙𝘀 o𝗻 𝗀а𝗹ո𝗈𝗏𝖾𝗅ѕ.𝗰о𝗺

We looked at each other.

I crossed the room and held out my hand. “Hello, boyfriend.”

He took it. “Hello, girlfriend.”

We shook hands, which was, in hindsight, a weird way to christen our relationship.

Then I said, “We’ll have to tell our parents.” I paused. “God. I’ve never met your mother. Do you think she’ll like me?”

He smiled. “She’ll love you. And you’ve already met her.”

I stared at him. “I’ve—what?”

I stood in the doorway and looked at what had become of the room.

The overturned lamp. The armchair with one leg bent at an angle that suggested it had been used as a battering ram. The curtain rod hanging at forty-five degrees from a single bracket. The French window had been boarded over two days ago, after Helen put a chair through it. The bathroom door was still intact — but only because Cameron had fitted a secondary lock on the outside.

Helen sat on the edge of the bed, arms crossed, jaw set, watching me with a mix of defiance and calculation.

“Come to gloat?” she said.

“No.” I stepped into the room. “Come to let you go.”

She stared at me.

“You can leave,” I said. “Now, if you want. The men at the door have been told to stand down. You can walk out, get in a cab, and do whatever you intended to do when you first came to London.”

“You’re bluffing.”

“I’m not.”

“You said you’d keep me here.”

“I changed my mind.”

She went very still for a moment, then looked hard past my shoulder, as if trying to spot an invisible trap.

When I didn’t move, she stood up slowly and walked toward the door. She stopped in front of me.

“I’m still going to the press,” she said. “I’ll tell them everything. Every paper, every channel, every outlet that’ll have me. Your dirty little secret.”

“I know.”

“And you’re just going to let me?”

“Yes.”

She searched my face. Whatever she was looking for — doubt, a crack in the composure, some sign that this was theatre — she didn’t find it, because it wasn’t there.

“Why?” she said finally.

I thought about the ultrasound image I’d been carrying in my jacket pocket for two days. Small, grey, not entirely legible to the untrained eye, but the specialist had pointed things out. A heartbeat. Ten fingers. The particular curve of a spine.

A daughter.

I thought about Hyacinth’s face as she looked at the screen, and imagined the expression on my own must have been identical.

“The person whose opinion matters most already knows,” I said. “She’s known for weeks. And she’s still here.”

Helen said nothing.

“Go,” I said. “Do what you need to do.”

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