The Boy with Her Eyes

Chapter 13

[Edmund’s POV]

I know something is wrong by nine-fifteen because Cora Whitfield doesn't make mistakes, and in the last hour she's made three. A meeting time entered wrong, an email sent without its attachment, a coffee placed on my desk with sugar when she learned on day two that I take it black.

From anyone else, it's a Tuesday. From her it's a five-alarm situation with no smoke, just heat, and I'm watching through my glass wall as she moves through the morning like someone running on hardware while the software crashed hours ago.

I don't push. Every time I've pushed, she's handed me a version of fine so polished I could see my own reflection in it—and her fine is a locked room, not an invitation.

The Whitmore debrief runs forty minutes. James talks margins, I nod at the right intervals, and the entire time my brain runs a parallel programme dedicated to the woman outside who poured sugar into black coffee and didn't blink.

I've retained twelve percent of what James said, and I'll pay for that tomorrow—but tomorrow isn't the problem sitting outside my office.

The corridor to the bathrooms passes the sad little alcove where someone installed a water fountain nobody uses. I'm heading back when I hear it—not crying, nothing that straightforward.

Breathing in pieces, caught and held and released in controlled intervals—someone rationing air because a full breath would collapse everything underneath.

My hand is on the door before the rest of me votes. I knock twice—soft, the knock you use when you already know the answer—and get silence, then water running, quick, performative.

The door opens and Cora is standing there composed the way a cracked vase is composed—everything in place as long as no one touches it. Her eyes are red at the rims, her jaw doing something I've only seen once before, the night in Kettleworth.

"Wrong turn?" She tries for the sharp, unbothered voice that usually sends me back to my lane.

"My office. Now, please." I hold the corridor open the way you hold a door for someone carrying something heavy. "The Henderson briefs can wait."

She takes the chair across from my desk and sits the way she always sits: straight back, hands visible, ready to take minutes at her own crisis. I close the glass door—no real privacy, but the sound barrier matters.

"I'm fine, Edmund." There it is—the word, delivered with her usual craftsmanship, smooth enough to frame. "Bad night. It won't affect the Whitmore deliverables."

"I'm not asking about deliverables." I sit on the edge of the desk instead of behind it, because the desk between us is a barrier and I don't want one right now. "Talk to me."

"There's nothing to—" She starts, and I say her name. Just Cora—no volume, no performance—and let the silence do the work I can't.

Her jaw unlocks by degrees. Her hands, flat on her knees, curl inward—fingertips pressing crescents into her palms—and something behind her eyes shifts from locked to cracking.

"The custody application was denied." Stripped of everything except information. "My background check flagged a criminal record."

My thumb finds the desk edge and presses hard enough to whiten the nail. "What kind of record?"

"Theft." She says it looking directly at me, chin level, daring me to flinch. "Two years ago, Blythe needed medication—prescription, the insurance lapsed, refill cost more than I had. So I took it off the shelf and walked out the front door. Conditional discharge—I thought it was behind me."

"For Blythe." My voice comes out quieter than I planned, and she echoes it back—for Blythe—her throat working once before the rest follows.

"And it gets worse. They've already placed her—some guardian I've never heard of has been approved, and she's in a house I can't find because the caseworker won't release the name until paperwork finalises."

I shift—my weight moves left and I correct it a beat too late. My eyes drop to the desk surface and stay there one second longer than they should. She's watching me, she always watches, but she's too deep in her own wreckage right now to read what my body just broadcast.

I can’t do it. As much as I want to—and God knows I do, badly—I can’t, I have no right.

"How long until the paperwork goes through?" I ask, and my jaw works around the edges, grinding against the parts I'm not saying.

"Days. Maybe longer." Her knuckles are bone-white, fingers interlaced. "I can file an appeal—written statement, evidence, references—then a hearing. Four to six weeks, they said, like we're scheduling a dental cleaning and not my sister's entire life."

"I have a solicitor—Charlotte Webb, family law." The offer comes out fast, too fast, covering ground it shouldn't need to cover. "She's excellent and she owes me a favour. She'd take your case tomorrow."

"I can't afford a solicitor, Edmund." Her voice is flat and factual—the money voice, the one that doesn't negotiate because the numbers already lost.

"You wouldn't be paying. Consider it an investment in keeping my best assistant functional—purely selfish motivation." The joke doesn't land the way I need it to, sits between us doing its best, and her eyes stay on mine long enough that the office shrinks.

"I stole medicine to keep her alive," she says, and her voice fractures along a seam I've never heard—not the Kettleworth voice, not the boardroom voice, something underneath both. "And now that's the reason I can't get her back. The one thing I did right is the thing that disqualified me."

My knuckles go pale against the desk. I stare at them because looking at her requires a kind of steadiness I don't have right now—there are words behind my teeth, heavy, sharp-edged, the kind that would change the shape of this room, and I swallow every single one.

"We'll figure this out." I mean it, and the we costs me something she can't see. "The appeal, the housing, all of it—you're not doing this alone anymore."

"There’s nothing in it for you." Her chin trembles once before she catches it, and I push through because stopping now would mean examining why my hands are shaking.

"As I’ve said—I need you at your best.” I deflect. “I'll call Charlotte tomorrow—strategy by Friday." My voice scrapes at the edges, raw with everything it's carrying underneath, and I watch her face do something I haven't seen from her before.

She nods—not the automatic kind, not the Kettleworth kind. A real one, stripped of every defence she's built since I've known her, eyes wet and wide and open in a way that does something to my ribs I will not be examining today or possibly ever.

"Thank you." Two words, given the way she gives nothing—openly, completely. "Edmund, genuinely—thank you."

She stands, straightens her blazer, and walks out. The door clicks shut behind her, and through the glass I watch her sit, open her laptop, begin typing—a woman who has somewhere to stand again.

I sit behind my desk. My hands press flat on the surface, fingers spread, as if the wood might move if I let go. Oliver's photograph catches window light from the shelf—mid-laugh, grass in his fist, green eyes enormous.

Charlotte Webb's number is already in my recent calls. I dialled it eleven days ago, the morning after Kettleworth, for reasons I told myself were simple and have turned out to be anything but.

Phones ring down the corridor. James laughs at something—normal sounds filling a building where nothing is wrong. I stare at the wall across from my desk, and I don't move for a very long time.