Married to a Billionaire Firefighter

Chapter 9

Julian's eyes moved to Ethan.

"This is your husband?" His gaze traveled from Ethan's face to the truck parked at the curb before returning to Charlotte.

A smile appeared on his lips.

"Are you that desperate, Charlotte?" He folded his arms across his chest. "You settled for this?"

Ethan said nothing. His hand remained at the small of Charlotte's back.

"Say whatever you want about me." Charlotte kept her eyes on Julian. "Do not disrespect my husband."

Julian's jaw tightened.

"The watch." He took a step forward. "You actually took it from Olivia and gave it to your Assistant?"

Charlotte laughed.

"Oh." She tilted her head. "So that's what this is about."

Julian's expression hardened.

"You didn't deserve it." Charlotte adjusted the strap of her bag. "It's too good for someone like you."

"Are you always like this?" Julian's hand tightened into a fist. "This bitter? Seven years and I never saw it."

He shook his head.

"Glad I ended things. You're Bennett after all."

Charlotte turned to Ethan.

"Babe." Her fingers brushed his sleeve. "Can we go? I can't keep listening to this."

"Sure." Ethan opened the truck door.

They walked toward the truck while Julian's voice followed them across the sidewalk. He called Charlotte's name once, then again, but she never looked back.

Ethan had his hand on the door when another hand landed on Charlotte's shoulder.

Charlotte turned first before Ethan did.

"You should have sold the watch." Julian's hand remained where it was. "Bought your husband a decent car. Or moved out of that studio."

His eyes lifted to Ethan.

"That's the only useful thing you could do for him."

Charlotte's hand struck his cheek with enough force that the sound carried down the street, and Julian's head turned sharply with the impact.

When he looked back at her, Charlotte's hand had already returned to her side.

"I warned you." She held his gaze. "Do not disrespect my husband."

She got into the truck.

Ethan remained where he was for a moment.

Julian stood on the sidewalk with one hand against his cheek.

Ethan closed the door and walked around to the driver's side.

~~~

The street noise faded as they crossed the bridge. Charlotte sat with her bag in her lap and her hands folded over it and looked out the passenger window.

After a while she said, "I'm sorry about that."

"It's okay."

"He had no right—"

"Charlotte." He kept his eyes on the road. "It's okay."

She was quiet for another block. Then: "I enjoyed myself tonight. Thank you for — the invitation being somewhere I could find it."

He almost smiled. "Glad you did."

She went to the bedroom when they got in. He heard the door close, not hard, just closed, and then her voice through it, quieter: "Goodnight."

"Goodnight," he said.

~~~

He sat on the couch for a while in the dark.

He thought about Derek, who had called her simple three months ago.

“She's not complicated,” Derek had said. “Accommodating. She'll do what she's told and be grateful about it. The engagement is a business arrangement and she understands that.”

Derek had not hesitated when he said it.

Ethan thought about Charlotte slapping Julian Mercer and telling him her husband deserved better.

His phone buzzed on the cushion beside him, he looked at the screen, it was Sylvia.

He got up and went to the kitchen window before he answered.

"Sylvia."

"The Nakamura account,” she said, without preamble. "They want a call this week. Thursday or Friday. And the board is asking about the New York expansion timeline. Hendricks specifically. He wants the infrastructure proposal before the end of the month."

"Friday works for Nakamura. Tell Hendricks the proposal will be out next week."

"You're still at the firehouse?"

"Yes."

Then he paused.

Sylvia had been with Calder Capital for six years and had learned which pauses were questions and which were statements. This one was a statement.

"The situation here is developing," he said. "I need more time."

"Ethan."

"I know."

"The board—"

"I said I know, Sylvia." Not hard. Just final. "Wednesday. Tell Hendricks Wednesday."

She said goodnight and ended the call. Ethan lowered the phone and stood at the kitchen window for a while, looking out at the garden below.

Then he went to the bookshelf.

It was the third shelf from the top, behind the John Donne, behind the two volumes he kept for the specific purpose of making the jotter invisible to anyone who didn't know to look. He took it out and sat back down on the couch.

The cover was brown and worn at the corners, the pages soft from years of being handled and then not handled and then handled again. His mother's handwriting on the inside cover. Her name. The date she'd started it.

He opened it to the photograph.

It was tucked between the last two written pages, exactly where he'd found it three years ago in a box he hadn't opened in the twelve years since the fire. Two women. His mother on the left in a yellow dress he didn't remember but recognised from other photographs, younger than he ever knew her, laughing at something outside the frame.

Margaret Bennett on the right.

He had looked at this photograph so many times in three years that he no longer needed to look at it to see it. He knew the angle of his mother's head. He knew the way Margaret Bennett's hand was raised slightly, like she was mid-sentence. He knew the building behind them, which he had traced to a campus in Connecticut that both women had attended at the same time in the late 1980s.

He turned to the last entry.

His mother's handwriting, the specific slant of it that he had memorised before he'd understood why.

“May 19, 2010.”

“Tomorrow. Brooklyn. Margaret needs to know. I should have gone sooner. I've waited too long already. She deserves to know what Richard has been doing and who Eleanor really is. I owe her that much. She was kind to me when she didn't have to be and I have let too many years pass.”

“Tomorrow. I'll go tomorrow.”

She had written it the night before the fire.

Ethan closed the jotter. Held it with both hands in his lap and looked at the dark window across the room.

Three years in Brooklyn. Three years at the firehouse, in the neighbourhood, close enough to the Bennett world to watch it without being seen.

He had come here for one reason, to find what his mother had found, to understand what she had known that had made her worth silencing.

He had not come here expecting Charlotte Bennett to call him and ask him to marry her.

He thought about the board meeting Charlotte had described over dinner. Twelve directors had watched her across the table while she sat there with her notebook open and said, "I made a promise to myself that night and I kept it." She had not looked away from any of them.

Three years in Brooklyn had not been an accident. Neither had the firehouse. Neither had the life Ethan Calder had built around himself.

The thread had begun with his mother's handwriting.

He put the jotter back behind the John Donne and went to make himself a glass of water and stood in the kitchen for a while listening to the apartment settle around him.

Charlotte's door was still closed.

“What did she know that was worth killing her for?” Ethan thought to himself.

He finished the water and went to the couch and lay down and looked at the ceiling and did not sleep for a long time.