The Luna Who Walked Back In

CHAPTER FOUR

CHAPTER FOUR

Title: The Lobby

POV: Evelyn

Albert is standing near the far wall when she steps out of the elevator, one hand pressed flat against the marble surface like he needs it to stay upright. He is taller than she remembers, and thinner, and he has the look of someone who has not been sleeping in months. His wolf energy hits her from across the lobby, wild and fractured and confused, the way a compass behaves near a magnetic field it cannot make sense of.

He sees her and his jaw tightens.

She walks toward him anyway. She has nothing to prove to his discomfort.

"You called me," she says.

"I did not know it was your firm," he says. "The specialist is on the fourth floor. I did not know you were here."

"But you called me."

He looks away. "You were in my contacts. You have always been in my contacts and I never deleted it."

She does not respond to that. "What is happening with your wolf?"

"It started three weeks ago. Small episodes. I thought it was grief still working through the bond. But today, the second I walked into this building, it spiked." He swallows hard. "It feels like something that should be dead is alive nearby."

She keeps her face very still. She has become extremely good at that this year.

The stairwell door opens.

Raphael steps through it.

He stops when he sees Albert. Albert turns at the sound. The moment they see each other, something in the lobby changes pressure, the way air changes before a storm. Albert's wolf releases a sound that starts in his chest and comes out of his throat as something between a gasp and a growl. His knees bend slightly. His hand leaves the wall.

Raphael crosses the lobby without hesitating.

Evelyn steps to the side. She does this deliberately, cleanly, giving them the space without disappearing from it. She stays near the elevator and she watches.

Albert cannot seem to decide whether to run or collapse. He does neither. He stands there while his father closes the distance between them and then he makes a sound that has nothing to do with wolves at all. It is just a son, who thought his father was dead for a year, discovering that he was wrong.

Raphael puts both arms around him.

The lobby is very quiet. The receptionist at the front desk is pretending to type. Evelyn looks at her shoes.

It takes four minutes. Then Raphael pulls back and says something to Albert that Evelyn cannot hear. Albert nods. His wolf settles slowly, like a fraying rope being re-tied knot by knot.

Raphael looks across the lobby at Evelyn.

She meets his eyes. She gestures toward the elevator.

They go upstairs together, all three of them, in a silence so full it barely fits in the car. Evelyn watches the floor numbers change. Raphael stands to her left. Albert stands to her right, still steadying himself, and she notices that he is very careful not to stand too close to her, not out of coldness but out of something that looks uncomfortably like shame.

She files that away too.

In the conference room, she pours three glasses of water and sits at the head of the table. Albert looks at her. She holds his gaze. She does not make it easy for him and she does not make it hard. She just looks at him like he is a person and waits.

"I owe you an explanation," he starts.

"You owe me more than that," she says, without heat, just plainly. "But we will start with the explanation."

He nods. He opens his mouth to begin. And then Raphael, across the table, sets a name down in front of them like a stone.

Albert goes very still.

The name is Desmond.

Albert looks at his father. Then at Evelyn. Then back at his father.

"He was the one who told me," Albert says slowly.

"I know," Raphael replies.

Albert's hands, which had been steady for the first time since the lobby, began to tremble.

Evelyn reaches into her bag. She pulls out a folder. She sets it on the table and turns it to face Albert.

His eyes move across the first page. Then the second. His face goes through four different things in thirty seconds, and none of them are simple.

She has had this for three months. The documents. The communications. Desmond's financial records, the shell company registrations, the contact logs between Desmond and Hollow Fang operatives, all of it. She built the case quietly, on her own time, in the year that Albert spent believing she was guilty of something she never did.

"You knew," Albert says and it is not an accusation. It sounds more like something breaking open.

"Uhmmm…not exactly, I suspected, then I confirmed," she says. "I was waiting until the legal case was complete before acting."

Albert stares at the folder. The trembling in his hands does not stop.

Outside the conference room windows, the city moves on without them, indifferent and bright, and in this room, something that has been wrong for an entire year begins, slowly and painfully, to be put right.

But Evelyn is not done yet. There is still one thing she needs Albert to understand before any of them can move forward.

She reaches for a second folder, the one she has not shown anyone, not even Mirabel, and sets it on the table between them.