The Unwanted Wife's Return (Ex-Husband Wants Me Back) novel Chapter 228

228 /381

Gathering Information

ELIJAH’S POV:

Lucas and I had not started out as people who would naturally take to each other. When Hannah had first come back into my life he had made his position very clear at dinner that first night, cool and measured, and I had respected it because it told me exactly what kind of friend he was to her.

Over the months since, we had built something I would call a solid working trust with genuine warmth underneath it that neither of us talked about directly, which was probably the right amount of talking about it for two people like us. We were very different. But we both loved Hannah and we both understood what that meant when things got difficult, and that shared understanding had turned out to be more than enough to build on.

It was early afternoon by the time Lucas could get away from his own office. In the two hours between calling him and his arrival I went for a walk around the compound, which is not something I do often and which my body seemed to find both unexpected and welcome.

I thought about what Rowan job had actually looked like day to day. Attending events, making small conversation and being the type of friendly professional presence that a city like this is full of. Asking Hannah to dinner with the right amount of persistence and the right amount of graceful acceptance when she said no, so that he never set off any alarm in her, so that she filed him away as just a man who had been a little bit forward and moved on. Sending reports back about what the collection was becoming, how much press it was getting, whether it looked like the kind of thing that was going to break out of local attention and into the kind of international coverage that would make the name Mirada something everyone in the fashion world knew.

And at some point the reports had presumably said: it is going to break out. It is going to be significant. People are paying attention and the story at the centre of it is her mother.

And Aldric Voros, seventy-three years old and sitting in London or Milan surrounded by everything he had built on a foundation that was not his, had read those reports and made a decision.

He arrived that afternoon and handed me a coffee as he came through the door which I had not asked for but appreciated.

“Your message said it was serious,” he said, settling onto the couch in my office. “Just say it. I can tell when you are working up to something.”

I told him about Adele, the folder, Mirada and the partnership and the erasure and the name Aldric Voros and what the connection to the fire almost certainly was.