Page 97 of The Stolen Queen
At first, Henry appeared stuck, like the marble floors had turned to quicksand, but then he took a step forward. “Charlotte. My God. It’s you.”
They stood a yard apart, surveying each other, Henry shifting uncomfortably from foot to foot, as if he wanted to take her into his arms. Charlotte remained where she was, stiff, her body turned to ice. If he dared to approach her, she was sure she’d crack into pieces. This was the man she’d married, the man she’d carried a child for, the man who had run away and disappeared into the ether. Until now.
“Follow me,” Charlotte said to Henry. She turned to Annie. “Thanks for the call. I’ve got it from here.”
Annie nodded and stepped back, her eyes worried.
Charlotte took Henry to the most private place in the museum, the rooftop, where visitors weren’t allowed.
“You planning on pushing me off?” Henry quipped as they stepped out onto a large, unoccupied balcony. Charlotte hadn’t seen him for just over four decades, but she knew from his tone that hewas only half joking. Good. Let him wonder whether or not she was unhinged. She wasn’t sure herself, at this very moment.
“Figure I’d give myself the option,” she answered back.
Neither of them smiled.
In the watery winter light, their days in the desert seemed like another lifetime. Charlotte’s stomach felt like it was full of rocks, her head reeled. She noticed Annie emerging from the shadows of the doorway but didn’t mind the intrusion. The girl held back, giving them some privacy while keeping a wary eye on Charlotte, her presence a comfort to what was sure to be a difficult conversation.
“What are you doing here?” Charlotte asked Henry. “After forty-one years.Forty-one years.Now you show up?”
“Friends in Cairo phoned me to say there had been some kind of a raid, that the gallery was shut. I tried to reach Heba with no luck, and then I learned that Mona had been arrested here in New York. I was sick with worry and flew out immediately. She wouldn’t tell me what was going on, other than to say that the person responsible for her arrest was Charlotte Cross, from the Met. She added that she was fairly certain I’d know who that was.”
The way the names of Henry’s new family so easily tripped off his tongue made Charlotte sick with jealousy and resentment.Shehad been there first. Hers and Layla’s should be the names on his lips, not those of these two strangers. He’d created a whole other life after ruining hers, and now he thought he could share his concern for their well-being with her as if she were some random bystander?
He must’ve read the fury in her face. He reached out helplessly with his hands. “I didn’t know you were alive. You have to believe me, Charlotte. I thought you’d died in the shipwreck.”
“Did you bother to look for me, even?”
“Of course. It was chaos, no one knew what was going on. What happened?”
She shook her head, remembering. “It was terrible.”
“Tell me.”
The words came out slowly. “They brought me to a hospital at first, but I was out of my mind with worry, and I was screaming, I couldn’t stop screaming. They gave me some kind of sedative, and the next thing I knew, I woke up in a psychiatric hospital. I was in and out for days, weeks, maybe, before I was able to pull myself together and face what happened. They said you were never found.” She couldn’t say Layla’s name out loud. She wouldn’t say it. He didn’t deserve to hear it.
“Please believe me, I tried,” implored Henry.
She cut him off, hating the distraught look in his eyes. “But there were extenuating circumstances, weren’t there? You and Leon had to flee the country, that’s why we left in such a rush, right?” She waited, but Henry didn’t deny it. “Maybe, if you weren’t on the run, you would have found me eventually. Leon said it was your idea to smuggle antiquities out of the country in the first place.”
“No, that’s not true. Leon had been doing it long before he convinced me to join in, during that summer we worked at the Egyptian Museum. He said it would be better to get the antiquities into the hands of a buyer who would take care of them, not the Egyptian Museum, where they’d be stuck in crates in the basement and never seen again. But that’s all nonsense, I realize now.” He thrust his hands into his pockets. “To be honest, I was desperate to make something of myself, prove to you and your parents that I was worthy of you. My salary was a pittance, and on top of that we were starting a family. Meanwhile, I was struggling to pay the rent on the apartment in Cairo. I kept wondering how on earth I could afford to take care of a wife and daughter.”
“Why didn’t you tell me this?”
“I couldn’t bear to see the disappointment in your eyes. I figuredthe money would give us a head start and your parents would see that I was a good husband, a good provider.
“The night of the shipwreck and for the next two days I scoured the hospitals until one of the doctors told me to stop pestering them, that you were most likely dead. I was in shock. I went to the airport and took the next plane out using the forged documents Leon had given me. I’m so, so sorry.” He was pleading now. “I wrote your parents a letter a few months after the accident, telling them how much I loved you and how sorry I was for their loss. I wanted them to know that I thought of you every day.”
Charlotte’s head spun as she tried to digest this new information. “You wrote to my parents?”
“Yes. Your father wrote back, saying that they were in mourning and requesting that I never contact them again. I’m sure they wanted nothing to do with me, which I understood, of course.”
That couldn’t be right. “In mourning?”
“Yes. In mourning. So you can imagine my shock hearing your name from Mona.”
It was no surprise that Charlotte’s parents would want to keep Henry as far away from her as possible. After all, he was the man who’d ruined their daughter. And it wasn’t the only instance that important information had been kept from Charlotte. Her mother had burned the letter from Mr. Zimmerman offering her a job, and the only reason she’d known was that she’d overheard their exchange. Otherwise, her life might have taken an entirely different trajectory, as it also would have if they’d informed her of Henry’s correspondence.
Henryhadtried to contact her. She remembered her mother’s words on her deathbed. She’d said a man had been looking for Charlotte; she’d apologized for having interfered. It was Henry, all that time. “They lied to you. I was alive.”