The Society Karen Guyler (best books to read .TXT) 📖

Her father, she should channel him. She would have, if she could have remembered much beyond the canonised version her eight-year-old mind and experience gave her. Beyond doubt, from all his stories that she’d read, reread, played, replayed, she could use his tenacity, his need to get to the heart of the matter, to lay bare lies and dissembling until he revealed the truth. She was his daughter, after all.

She pulled up a smile—easy, breezy, isn’t that what the Americans said?—and let herself into the mirror image of the office she’d just left.

“Eva?” Charles looked like she’d hit him with the bottle. “What are you doing here? I mean, it’s good to see you, I didn’t realise. . .”

Her heart contracted. “You’ve forgotten I’m half-Swedish? Everything is gone from my life now, so why not make a new start here?” She held his gaze, giving him the chance to do the most important thing and ask about Lily, to do the right thing and apologise.

“That’s great, that you’re moving on.”

“You’re not going to ask me about Lily? About what you did to her?”

He did a double-take. “I went back for her but there were police everywhere so I—”

“Left her again. She drank the tap water, Charles, your note fell off the bottle so she drank the tap water.”

He had the grace to look appalled. Eva hardened her heart. She didn’t want him to know Lily was healthy, spending time with Per’s widow while Eva did this. A sharp break was the kindest thing in the circumstances.

“I never meant—”

“For someone who never meant so much, you’ve caused enough destruction.” She softened her tone. “So the Nobel Committee will reconsider your work, I understand.”

“After this year, I’m not holding my breath. I was convinced Per would make it a done deal.”

Eva broke the seal on the Scotch bottle with more force than it needed. Not a thought for her loss? He had been her godfather, her mentor, her family. She’d spent sleepless nights wishing he’d followed Addison’s lead and just opted for a neat whisky.

She unwound the pink bubble-wrap and placed the glass on her right. Folding the packaging, she laid it on Kristina’s desk.

“You drink Scotch now?” Surprise hitched Charles’ voice up.

“There’s lots about me now that’s different. Still no water, ice?”

He shook his head. The irony.

She unwrapped the white bubble-wrap, her wedding and engagement ring clinked against the sturdy glass as she placed it on her left. Undoing the lid of the scotch, she waited for him to talk to her. He watched her pouring a measure into one glass.

“You know where the tradition came from, the clinking of glasses?” She filled the silence. He shook his head. “It came from right here, when the Vikings would go to each other’s halls and drink to peace or co-operation or the formation of raiding parties. They’d smash their tankards into each other so that the liquid slopped from one to the other. If the drinks were poisoned, both would die. Now we all use glasses, it’s become a gentler touch.”

The scotch glugged into the other glass.

“Why are you here?” Charles asked.

“As our marriage is over, one of us has to start divorce proceedings. Kristina mentioned she would be seeing you, so I realised it could be me.”

He nodded. Not even trying to save it? Had their life together been such a farce? How had she never noticed? Even looking at him now, she still couldn’t see a different man from the one she thought she knew.

She pushed the glass on the left-hand side towards him, the left, the link to her heart. The room was drowning in irony now.

He lifted it, inclined it towards her. “Skol.”

“I don’t feel like toasting you, Charles, There’s nothing for me to celebrate here.”

“You brought the scotch.” He sipped it. “Not bad.”

“Per bought it for you, he wanted us all to spend Christmas together.”

Charles tried it again. If he apologised, she wasn’t sure she wouldn’t smash the bottle over his head. “Very good, in fact.”

“Who was she, Charles, Nancy Seymour? To you, I mean. Was she your mistress?”

He looked at the amber liquid in his glass instead of her. “She was who I left you for the first time but things didn’t—”

“Don’t insult me with lies, not now, not after everything. You took so much from me, at least I deserve your truth, don’t I?”

He nodded. A sip more of Dutch courage. “I left her to be with you when I realised what you were doing with Every Drop. I’d discovered the agent before then, but I knew I could make an antidote to it. It was my agent that helped Jed Carson become a senator by contaminating the oil of one of his big rivals. Running for office in America is impossible without mega money. Thanks to my tech, Jed cleaned up, wiped out his competitor, took over his assets, his company. Turned it around, cashed in big time. Then he invested in my research to show he was legitimate.”

The politics didn’t interest Eva, though the listening audience wouldn’t feel that way. She allowed herself one final personal question. “You were always intending to go back to her, weren’t you?”

He nodded.

Eva gripped the edge of the desk. “Every Drop’s being dissolved. Did Stuart tell you?”

“No, I, it wasn’t like that, it wasn’t meant to be—”

“Wasn’t meant to be?” Eva almost shouted.

“It was an insurance policy. The monies paid by people for safe water would reimburse Stuart and myself for our time invested in the company, and provide ongoing income, enough that I could disappear. Jed Carson was working his way down his hit list, he had a long reach.”

Eva reined in her outrage, her anger at him, her grief at who he really was. She needed him to give her everything. “Your emergency fund, that was from the sale of your two-part process, wasn’t it?” He nodded, but she needed verbal agreement. “So who you sold it to had the knowledge and intelligence