Divorced and Desired

Chapter 7: Richard's Office

Claire didn't wait for the car to disappear down the road before she moved.

She grabbed her coat, told the housekeeper she had errands, and had a car pulled around within ten minutes. Rain had thinned overnight into a fine mist, the kind that clung to hair and coat sleeves without ever quite becoming real rain. Silver crest slid past the window in shades of gray, the streets slick and shining, the smell of wet pavement drifting in through the cracked window even at speed.

Richard's office sat on the fourth floor of a narrow brick building off Marrow Street, just behind Ashcombe Row, with a small brass plaque by the door reading R. BENNETT — CONSULTING. Claire had barely knocked before he opened it, like he'd been watching for her car from the window the whole time.

"You look like you didn't sleep at all," he said, stepping back to let her in.

"I didn't." Claire sank into the chair across from his desk, the same worn leather she remembered from the couch in his apartment, and pressed her palms flat against her knees to still them. "Richard, I need you to tell me everything. Not pieces. Everything you know about Victor Kane."

Richard shut the door and lowered himself into his chair, slow, like a man stepping into cold water. "I told you last night, it's dangerous to talk about this over text."

"We're not over text anymore." Claire's voice came out sharper than she meant it, but she didn't soften it. "I heard Edward Sterling on the phone last night, in a part of the house I'm not supposed to know exists, talking about an arrangement that's been running for eleven years. He said Kane's people. He said Margaret handles the safe. I watched my husband drive off this morning toward a private airfield, wearing someone else's perfume, right after telling me it was just a supplier meeting. She leaned forward. "I am not walking back into that house blind again."

Richard went quiet for a long moment, his jaw working like he was chewing through something before he let it out. Outside his window, a delivery truck idled at the curb, its engine a low, steady hum beneath the city noise, ordinary and unbothered by the conversation happening four floors up.

"Victor Kane was your father's business partner," Richard said finally. "Before you were born. They built a logistics firm together, small at first, but it grew fast. Too fast, some people thought. Then, about a year before your parents' accident, your father started pulling away from him. Quietly. He never told me why, not fully. He just said Kane wasn't who he thought he was."

Claire's throat tightened. "And then my parents died."

"And then your parents died." Richard's voice stayed even and careful, but something in his eyes had pulled backward into a memory he clearly didn't enjoy revisiting. "The official report called it a wet road and a bad night. I never believed that, not fully, but I had no proof, and a grieving twenty-year-old girl didn't need a conspiracy theory on top of a funeral. So I kept the file. I waited."

"For what?"

"For you to be ready to ask." He met her eyes. "You're asking now."

Claire's hands were still in her lap. Finally, the shaking was replaced by something colder and steadier. "What does Kane want from the Sterling? Why would Edward be protecting him for eleven years?"

"I don't know that part yet," Richard admitted. "That's new information, what you heard last night. If Sterling has some kind of arrangement with Kane, that changes things. It means he's not just circling your family. He's already inside the walls of the one you married into."

The words landed heavy. Claire thought of the safe; she moved twice this year. Of Nora's warning. Margaret's sister vanished, her photograph gathering dust in a locked wing nobody was supposed to enter.

"There's a woman in that house," Claire said slowly. "Margaret's sister. She disappeared. Nobody talks about her."

Richard's face changed, just slightly, a flicker he tried and failed to smooth over fast enough.

"You know about her," Claire said. It wasn't a question.

"I know a name," Richard said carefully. "I know your father mentioned a woman once, in passing, someone connected to Kane's circle who vanished around the same time everything started falling apart. I never confirmed it was the same person. I didn't have a reason to look, not until now."

Claire studied him, feeling the shape of something enormous, close enough to sense but still tangled too deep in old secrets to fully see. "Richard, what am I walking into?"

"I don't know yet." He reached across the desk and covered her hand with his, steady and grounding. "But I promise you this. Whatever it is, you won't walk into it alone. Not this time."

Claire's phone buzzed against her leg. She yanked it out, expecting Alexander, expecting some easy lie about the meeting running long.

It was a text from an unknown number. Not the same blocked one as before — a new one entirely.

Ask Richard what happened to the woman in the west-wing photograph. And ask him why he's the one who took the picture.

Claire looked up slowly from the screen, straight at Richard, and set the phone down on the desk between them, screen facing him.

The color left his face in an instant, and for the first time since she'd known him, Richard Bennett looked like a man who had no idea what to say next.