“Am I bothering you?” he asks when I open the door.
“No, I wasn’t doing anything special.” I invite him in, gesturing for him to sit on the sofa.
“You skipped the gym today. That’s not like you,” he scolds me.
“I went on Sunday. I had a credit.”
“Royal & Lloyds,” says Charles, glancing at my laptop, which is open to a real estate page. “Are you looking for a new buyer?”
“I was actually thinking of selling this apartment and moving. Your idea of a cottage in Primrose isn’t so bad, now that I think about it.”
“I thought you hated family neighborhoods.”
“I think I need a change. Can I offer you something? Water? Tea? Coffee?”
“I’m fine, thanks. I wanted to talk to you.”
“About what?”
“Well ...” he reaches into his briefcase and takes out a copy of the territorial plan that I brought to the meeting this morning. “About this.”
“Oh.”
“Crazy timing, huh? These guys from the municipality are real killjoys,” he observes with a strange smile.
“Totally.”
“I was rereading it this afternoon, and I noticed a few grammatical and spelling errors.” He shows me several passages that he’s underlined with a red ballpoint pen, like an elementary school teacher. “They were in such a hurry, they didn’t even correct it.”
“You know, Charles—”
“You know, Michael,” he interrupts me, “you speak Italian very well, even better than I do, even though I’m a native speaker. You have an exceptional command of accents and an impeccable ear for languages ... That said, you’ve always sucked at writing.”
“I wrote it,” I admit.
“It’s obvious.”
“I’m sorry, Charles.”
“You know I could report you, right?” Charles’s tone is strangely ambiguous, and I struggle to discern whether or not he’s joking.
“The only way to blow up the sale was to make Bogdanovic lose interest,” I explain.
“I won’t even ask why you did it.”
“Elisa,” I say, simply. I know that’s enough to get the point across.
“In any case, you may have done me a favor too,” says Charles.
I look at him, perplexed. “Oh yeah?”
“I know I could have made a good amount from the sale, but I’ve never been convinced that Bogdanovic’s money is all that clean. I’d prefer zero pounds to dirty millions in my account. He may be a golf course developer now, but I don’t know what he did before that, and I have serious suspicions about people who become billionaires overnight from nothing.”
“So you won’t report me?”
“No. And I won’t tell Caroline.”
Bingley looks at me, and I see nothing but affection in his eyes, like that of a blood brother—or more.
