THE HEIR OF HARTWELL

Chapter 2

The message was brief.

Alexander had not meant to read it. Vivienne's phone had lit up on the bedside table while she was in the shower, and he had glanced over purely on instinct, the human reflex toward light and movement. It was from a contact saved as S.H. The message read: Tomorrow, same time. I have booked the room.

He put the phone back exactly as he had found it. He lay on his side of the bed, the left side, always the left side, the side closer to the window, and stared at the ceiling for a long time. The shower ran. The pipes in the old townhouse made their familiar sounds. Somewhere outside, a cab idled at the corner.

He had, he supposed, known for some time. The knowing had simply been somewhere beneath the surface, waiting for him to stop being too busy surviving to acknowledge it.

* * *

The following morning he rose before anyone else, as he always did. He made coffee he did not drink, eggs he did not eat. He watched the street outside brighten incrementally, the sky turning from navy to grey to the washed-out white of a London November. By the time Vivienne came downstairs, dressed and polished and carrying her work bag, he had resolved what he was going to do.

"I thought I would bring you lunch today," he said.

She paused in the act of checking her phone. "That is unnecessary."

"It is our anniversary. The first time we had lunch together."

She looked up. Something moved across her face, not guilt exactly, but something adjacent to it. "I have meetings."

"I will come at one. I will be quick."

She left without confirming it either way.

* * *

He took the Jubilee Line to Canary Wharf, carrying pasta al limone with roasted tomatoes, the same meal he had prepared the first day she had ever let him cook for her. The gesture was not sentimental. He needed a reason to be there that did not begin and end with suspicion. He needed to see it for himself.

The receptionist at Holt and Carrington recognised him and waved him through. He took the lift to the fourth floor. He walked down the corridor with the framed architectural drawings on the left wall. He stopped outside Vivienne's office.

The door was not fully closed.

He pushed it open.

She was there. So was the man he assumed was S.H., tall, expensively suited, the sort of handsome that required maintenance. They separated at the sound of the door. Vivienne straightened her blazer. The man looked at Alexander with irritation rather than shame, which told Alexander everything he needed to know about how long this had been going on.

"What are you doing here?" Vivienne said.

Alexander set the bag on her desk. "I brought you lunch," he said. His voice was very calm. He was surprised by how calm it was.

The man, Sebastian, he would learn later, Sebastian Holt, her colleague and junior partner, straightened his tie. "I will leave you two to it," he said, with the particular smoothness of someone who has extracted himself from scenes like this before.

"Do not bother," Alexander said. "I am not staying."

He looked at Vivienne. She met his eyes with a defiance that was, he understood now, purely reflex. She had decided long before this moment how she would behave if she were ever caught.

"Alexander."

"Do not," he said. He was not angry. He was, he realised, relieved. The knowing, which had been below the surface for so long, had finally broken through, and the water was unexpectedly clear.

He walked out. He took the lift back down. He stepped out into the grey November afternoon and stood on the pavement for a moment, the bag still in his hand.

He dropped it in the first bin he passed.

* * *

He returned to the house, Constance's house, he reminded himself, not his, to find it empty. He went upstairs. He showered. He changed. He was sitting in the kitchen with a glass of water when Vivienne arrived home.

She did not apologise. He had not expected her to.

What he had not expected was for her to set a brown envelope on the kitchen island and say: "I have had these drawn up for a few weeks. I think it is better for everyone."

He opened the envelope. Divorce papers. Clean, thorough, recently notarised.

"Fine," he said.

She blinked. "You are not going to argue?"

"No."

"Alexander, you will have nothing. No address. No—"

"Pen," he said.

She stared at him. He waited. She went to the drawer beside the hob and retrieved a pen and set it on the counter. He signed where the tabs indicated. He capped the pen. He picked up his keys, his personal keys, the small ring with nothing on it but the key to his storage unit in Bermondsey, the only space in London that was entirely his.

"You will regret this," she said, though her voice had lost its certainty.

He looked at her one last time. "I already regret the years I spent here," he said. "This is just the ending."

He walked out of the house. The door closed behind him with a soft, definitive click.

He stood on the pavement in Mayfair, in the dark, with nothing. He started walking with no particular destination, which was a feeling he recognised from childhood and had never entirely managed to leave behind.

He was somewhere near the Embankment, the river black and silver and indifferent beside him, when a Rolls-Royce slowed to a stop alongside him, and a window came down, and a man with silver hair and an expression of profound and cautious relief leaned out and said:

"Mr. Calloway. My name is Bernard Ashford. I have been trying to find you for a very long time."