RISE OF THE FORSAKEN SON-IN-LAW

Chapter 4

Oliver's phone rang as the Rolls-Royce carried him back across the city. He looked at the screen: Clarissa.

He let it ring twice more, then answered.

"Where are you?" she asked.

"Out."

"Geoffrey is asking questions. He wants to speak with you. If you come back tonight and explain things properly, I will tell Mother to be civil." A pause. "And there may be a position at Hale-Mortimer that Dominic could arrange. A junior analyst role. You would--"

He ended the call.

Edmund, who had politely looked out his window, said nothing.

"She is offering me a junior role," Oliver said, "at the company of the man she was sleeping with."

"Human audacity," Edmund said, in the tone of a man cataloguing a natural phenomenon, "continues to exceed my expectations."

Oliver almost smiled. It was the first time in hours that his face had considered it.

He signed the transfer documents properly at Edmund's solicitor's office the following morning -- a Georgian townhouse in Lincoln's Inn Fields where everything was panelled in dark oak and no one raised their voice. The lead solicitor explained the conditions with careful neutrality. Oliver listened, asked three precise questions, and left with a duplicate copy in a leather portfolio Edmund had produced from somewhere.

"You need a wardrobe," Edmund said, outside on the pavement.

"I have a wardrobe."

"You have the clothes you are wearing and a toothbrush. You need a wardrobe."

They went to a tailor on Savile Row where Edmund was known and where Oliver stood in good light while a man with a tape measure worked in respectful silence. He chose two suits -- a charcoal wool and a deep navy -- along with shirts and a pair of black oxfords that fit with the quiet confidence of shoes that were simply correct.

When he saw himself in the mirror, properly dressed, he stood still for a moment. He did not look like the man who had been asked to apologise on his knees in Clarissa's office. He looked like something else entirely. He filed this away.

The Ashworth estate was in Richmond: walled grounds, a drive lined with lime trees that had been there longer than the house, and the house itself -- Queen Anne, cream-painted, with a formal garden at the rear and a small cemetery where Oliver's mother was buried beneath a stone he had not been present to place.

"I would like a moment," he told Edmund, who nodded and took the driver to the kitchen.

He stood at the grave for a long time. He did not have much to say that the silence could not carry better. Eventually he crouched and pressed one hand flat against the cold marble and said, very quietly, "I'm here now," and stood and walked back toward the house.

Edmund met him at the door with tea, hot and strong, no milk, just as Oliver had taken it as a child.

"You remembered," Oliver said.

"I remember everything about you," Edmund said, with a simplicity that sat in the air between them like something solid.

* * *

Dinner that evening was the first time Oliver encountered Sebastian.

His half-brother was handsome in a way that photographs had not captured -- fair-haired, angular, with their father's jaw and a restless, flickering quality in his eyes that Oliver read in the first thirty seconds as something more than nervousness. Sebastian's wife, Genevieve, was beside him: composed, attentive to her husband in the specific way of someone managing a situation rather than loving a person.

Reginald made the announcement at the table -- Oliver's return, the transfer, the new chain of succession -- with the even tone of a man declaring a board resolution.

Sebastian's fork came down against the plate with a small, controlled crack.

"On what basis?" he asked.

"On the basis that it is my company and I have decided," Reginald said.

"He has been gone for nineteen years. He knows nothing about the business, nothing about the family--"

"Sebastian."

Sebastian sat back. His jaw was tight. He looked at Oliver with an expression that was not quite hatred -- it was more specific than that, more personal. The look of a man who has been promised something and has just watched someone else pick it up.

"Welcome home," Sebastian said, his voice flat and even. "Brother."

"Thank you," Oliver said, as though it were true.

He ate his dinner and said very little and watched and catalogued and understood that the danger in this house was not going to announce itself.