I looked down at his outstretched hand, stained with a smear of dust from the floor, a hand that had once held mine with what I’d mistaken for tenderness. I saw the desperation in his eyes, the wild, frantic plea of a king watching his throne burn, begging the arsonist for a bucket of water. But he had it wrong. He was the arsonist. I was just the one who had stopped pretending the fire was a celebratory bonfire.
“Help me,” he rasped, his voice a shredded ruin. “Clara, please. You’re the project consultant. You can fix this. We can say it was… a structural miscalculation. An unforeseen accident. Anything.”
An accident.
The word hung in the chaotic air between us. He wasn’t asking for forgiveness. He wasn’t grieving his mother’s legacy or the terrified old man he’d branded a squatter. He
