The rain began before the lights came on along the Thames, a fine London drizzle that turned the pavement slick and lent the air that faint metallic smell of wet coins. I folded a café apron into a square, set it with the others, turned the sign on the glass to CLOSED, and let the bell’s last jingle die. The street outside was a ribbon of umbrellas and taxi headlights, all of them going somewhere that wasn’t here.
My phone buzzed on the counter, a number I didn’t recognize. I considered letting it go to voicemail. Random numbers meant returns, surveys, the kind of administrative noise that fills the edges of a life like mine. But the café was empty, and the rain made everything sound honest.
“Hello?”
A man’s voice, warm in the way expensive clothes are warm. “Miss Evans?”
“Yes.”
“This is Jonathan Whitaker from Whitaker & Cole. May I have a moment of your time? It concerns a… delicate family matter.”
The name curled through my head like cigarette smoke. Family. A word that fit my life the way a pearl necklace fits a linen bag—wrong in texture, wrong in shine. “You’ve got the wrong number,” I said, automatically, though he’d used my name.
“I don’t believe I do,” he replied, and I could hear the faint shush of rain at his end, as if he were standing under some stone awning the color of money. “We represent the Richardson family.”
I steadied myself with the counter. The world knows that name. Newspapers teach you those surnames before they teach you poems. Richardson: property empires, media stakes, the kind of philanthropy you only do when your initials already have buildings. I laughed, and it came out thin. “What could the Richardsons possibly want with me?”
