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Home / Romance / Tempted by my brother-in-law. / Chapter 81 - Chapter 90

All Chapters of Tempted by my brother-in-law. : Chapter 81 - Chapter 90

121 Chapters

EMAIL

EMAILPOV: HazelThe email was three paragraphs long.I read it once fast and then I handed the phone to Nikolai and watched his face while he read it because I needed to see it land in someone else before I decided what to do with it landing in me.He read it slowly.His face did not change in any dramatic way. It did the thing it did when something significant arrived, the particular quality of stillness that was not blankness, was the opposite of blankness, was a man receiving something with his full attention and not spilling any of it before he was ready.He read it twice.Then he put the phone down on the bed between us.The email had been sent from an account set up in Elena's name by a solicitor. Not the same solicitor as the letter. A different one. Based in the city. The email explained this in the first paragraph, that Elena had set up the account two months before she died and had written several emails and scheduled them to send at specific triggers. This one had been tri

EDWARD

EDWARDPOV: NikolaiHe was standing at the gate.Not in a car. On foot, which meant he had walked from wherever he was staying or gotten out of a car and sent it away, and he was standing at the estate gate in the early morning with a bag over one shoulder and the patient quality of a man who had been waiting for something for two years and could manage another ten minutes.I went down to meet him.Hazel came with me.He was older than his voice had suggested on the phone. Mid seventies. Grey and slight and with Elena's eyes in a face that had done a lot of living, the specific texture of a person who had been through the worst thing and had kept going not because they had recovered but because stopping was not something they knew how to do.He looked at me.I looked at him.Neither of us said anything for a moment and that was the right call because there was no version of hello that worked here and we both understood that.Then he held out his hand and I took it and he gripped it br

HER

HEIRPOV: NikolaiI sat with the phone in my hand after Harris ended the call and looked at the folder on the table and the photograph of Margaret Varyn on her mountain and thought about what it meant for a man like Reeve to file something like that before eight in the morning.He had not slept.He had sat with whatever version of himself existed at three in the morning and he had called his legal team and he had filed a claim that transferred everything he had built on that mountain back to the family he had spent twenty years building against.It was not absolution.I was not going to call it that.It was a man at the end of his options doing the one concrete thing he had left that was not nothing.Edward Marsh was watching me from Vera's chair."Tell me," he said.I told him.He listened and when I finished he looked at the photograph of his daughter's research on the table and then at the ceiling and then back at me."She would have wanted that," he said. "The research back in the

GRANDFATHER

GRANDFATHERPOV: NikolaiI told Harris I would be there at ten.One hour before the statement. Enough time to hear what Reeve had to say and enough time after to decide what to do with it before I sat down in front of an investigator.Hazel came with me.We did not discuss whether she was coming. She put on her jacket and got in the car and I drove and the city moved past the windows in its morning configuration, people and traffic and the specific energy of a city that had woken up to a story on the front page and was still processing it.The investigators' building was in the central district, unremarkable, the kind of building that did not announce what happened inside it.Reeve was in a meeting room on the second floor.He looked smaller than he had in the financial district two days ago. Not physically. The specific reduction of a man who had been through the formal machinery of an interview process and had come out the other side without the architecture he had maintained for tw

WITNESS

WITNESSPOV: HazelWe drove back fast.Not speaking much. Nikolai had his eyes on the road and his jaw was set in the way it was when he was holding something carefully and I sat beside him and thought about a woman who had been on the mountain when Margaret Varyn died and had waited forty years to come to this house.Or had not waited.Had perhaps been waiting for the story to run before she came. Had perhaps been watching for the right moment the way everyone in this story seemed to have been watching for the right moment.Kaden met us at the door."She is in the sitting room," he said. "Vera is with her. She asked for Vera specifically.""How old is she," Nikolai said."Eighty," Kaden said. "Maybe more. She drove herself here which I found alarming but I did not say that.""What is her name," I said."Ruth," he said. "She did not give a surname. She said Vera would know who she was."We went to the sitting room.Ruth was small and white haired and had the specific stillness of a pe

MARGARET

MARGARETPOV: NikolaiI read the email twice.Then I handed the phone to Hazel and watched her read it and watched her face do the thing it did when something landed that she had not seen coming, the brief stillness before she assembled herself around it.She looked at me."She wrote to you," she said. "Three days before she died.""To someone," I said. "She did not know I existed. She wrote to a Varyn. To whoever came after her.""She knew someone would come," Hazel said."She knew the research would come back eventually," I said. "She trusted that." I looked at the bare wall where the portrait had been. "She trusted the family with it even at the end."Hazel looked at the phone."Do you want me to reply," she said."Yes," I said. "Tell them to send it."She replied and we stood in the entrance hall and waited and the house moved around us in its afternoon configuration and three minutes later the email arrived.Hazel handed me the phone.I took it and read it standing in the entranc

THIRTY

THIRTYPOV: NikolaiVera told us everything.Not in the managed way she had been telling things since the investigators arrived. Not the version shaped by what was safe to say and what needed to be held back. All of it, from the beginning, in the specific order it had happened, without stopping to assess how it was landing.She had known about Aleksei within a year of marrying Arthur.Arthur had told her himself. Not everything. The version he had. That his cousin had gone to the mountain and come back with documentation and that Margaret had died six days later and that the family had decided collectively and without discussion to treat the death as an accident and the research as lost and Margaret as a woman who had fallen on difficult terrain.Arthur had not been on the mountain.He had not been involved in whatever Aleksei had decided.But he had known and he had stayed in the family and he had carried it and it had been one of the things that sat between them in the early years o

ARTHUR

ARTHURPOV: NikolaiI sat on the stairs for a long time.The box was in my hands and the house was quiet and Sable had ended the call after saying what he needed to say and the name was sitting in the air around me the way names did when they changed the shape of everything that came before them.Arthur Varyn.The man Vera had loved for thirty years. The man who had told her about Aleksei on their second anniversary and carried the guilt of knowing and not acting for the rest of his life. The man who had sat in a facility outside the country in his final months and helped my mother plan her exit from a city that was keeping her trapped.The man who had removed a witness statement from the official record of his cousin's death.I sat with the specific discomfort of a truth that did not resolve neatly. The version of Arthur that Vera had loved and the version that had signed his name to a removal order were the same person and I did not know yet what to do with that and I was not going

LENA

LENAPOV: HazelI woke up because Nikolai sat up fast.Not loudly. He did not make a sound. But the quality of the air in the room changed the way it changed when someone moved with urgency they were trying to contain and I was awake before I had decided to be.He was on the phone.I lay still and listened to his side of it and assembled what I could and what I assembled did not make immediate sense so I waited until he ended the call and turned to look at me.He told me.I sat up.My mother had been on Cold Stone Mountain the day Margaret Varyn died.She had filed a witness statement.Arthur Varyn had removed it.I sat in the dark bedroom with those three facts and tried to find a configuration where they fit together without implicating my mother in something I did not want her implicated in and I could not find one that worked completely and I was not going to pretend otherwise."She was twenty years old," I said."Approximately," Nikolai said. "She would have been around that age.

PHOTOGRAPH

PHOTOGRAPHPOV: HazelMy father sent the photograph while we were still on the phone.It came through as an image on Nikolai's screen and we both looked at it and I took the phone from him and held it closer and looked at the three people standing in what was clearly the valley, the specific quality of the light and the low dense growth visible behind them.Margaret on the left.A young man in the middle who I did not recognise, dark haired, early twenties, with the kind of face that had not yet settled into what it was going to become.And my mother on the right.Nineteen years old.Standing in the valley on Cold Stone Mountain six days before Margaret Varyn died with her hand raised slightly against the light and her face turned toward Margaret and the specific expression of someone who was listening to something that interested her.She had not told me she had been in the valley.She had told me she had spoken to Margaret. She had told me Margaret had shown her the compound. She ha

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