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A dark laugh bursts from her as I turn her around and take her into one of the smaller meeting rooms. “I don’t know what they were meeting about yesterday. The minute Francis got there, my dad sent me home, and that’s the last time I saw him alive.”
“My uncle said that he was having a hard time with your mum?”
“Yeah, he was…because of her. Ever since she’s turned up, everything has fallen to shit. My dad never wanted to take her back to the residences—he wanted to send her to that fucking looney bin from the off. Mum didn’t let him though. She said that they’d done enough, and now it was time to make up for it.”
That looming feeling returns with a vengeance. Something that I can’t shirk, not even as she looks at me, pleased with herself for finally making me feel what she’s been trying to show me all this time.
“I tried to ask him what she meant by that, but he said that it was best if I stayed out of it.”
“Did you?” Perching on the edge of the table, I push a chair out with my foot for her to sit on.
My insides are vibrating with an anger that’s brewing deep, so strong that all I can do not to shake everything she knows out of her is fist the edge of the glass desk until it feels as though it may crack in my grasp.
“Did you stay out of it?”
“What do you take me for?”
Laura walks around to the opposite side of the table and perches on the table as a way of showing me that she won’t pander to me. We twist in different directions so that her back is to the glass wall looking over the hallway, and mine is to the view of Whitehall Palace.
“My father didn’t want her back. I don’t know why, but I’m certain that her disappearance isn’t what we thought. I caught him deleting files when she returned and burning documents with your grandfather’s seal and Charles’ signature.”
“And you didn’t think to tell us?” The question comes out as a bark as I hammer my fist on the glass top.
“Tell you what? That my dad was cleaning his files? What was I supposed to tell you to make you listen to me?”
“The fucking facts, Laura!” I push to my feet as I yell, pacing the width of the room as she mirrors me in opposite directions.
“How many times was I supposed to listen to you call me a jealous bitch or whatever it is that you think I am?”
“Don’t act like you’re hard done by us.”
“Hard done…” she scoffs. “Listen to yourself. I couldn’t give a flying fuck what you or any of the others actually think of me. However, you can bet your arse that I’m not going to preach at a fucking brick wall. Besides, I thought you would be all eyes on her and that maybe after all these years you would see it.”
“See what? You’re fucking talking in riddles, and I’ve had enough of them. So fucking spit it out, or I swear to God, I don’t give a fuck what you walked into today, I’ll—”
“I blinked, Freddie. That’s all. I knew he was looking into the doctors’ reports, after the whole thing at the clinic…if you hadn’t gotten to her in time, I don’t think he would’ve cared. I don’t think he would be dead.”
There’s something about what she says that needles at me. Not that I can put my finger on it for the life of me, but there’s something that keeps me sifting through my memory to try and pinpoint what it is.
“What was he looking into?”
“The staff at the clinic, the injury report from the doctor at Mayday,” she sighs at the mention of the secret service hospital. “Something changed that night you brought her back.”
“I told her that I would stay with her, but I couldn’t. I…”
“You shook her off.” The remark turns into a dark laugh as she pauses in front of the window and looks out over the city splayed in front of us in the pitch-black night. “Good on you. We should’ve done it sooner.”
Pacing to where she’s standing, I pause beside her. “Why was he looking into the staff at the clinic?”
“My dad didn’t believe that she was taken from there. It’s what started the fight between him and my mum. They brought her back from the hospital that second time, and she was so angry. Not like how you would expect her to be after the ambush you lot planned.”
“I didn’t know there was a particular kind of angry for getting carted off to a madhouse.” I side glance down at her to find her side-eyeing up at me.
“Don’t be a prick just because you can.” Another sigh blusters from her lips as she looks back out, and I notice the scar on her temple. I’m trying to marry the person that would hurt her sister like that after years of being hurt themselves to the person that I walked to the park and took for coffee. The volatility in one just doesn’t add up with the fragility of the girl that begged me not to leave her. “How can you not see it? You so much as blink and she’s a completely different person.”
If you know what’s good for you, don’t fucking blink.
“Did your father tell you that?” I ask as Harry’s words from the day I first took Lucy out on our own come back to me, the needling subsiding as it gives way to more frustration and more questions fill my mind.
