Part 2: The Trial Continues

Two months in, and the office had a new rule nobody had actually written down, but everyone somehow knew. If Edward started a sentence with "just to be clear," you needed to sit down first.

"Just to be clear," Edward said, standing at the front of Monday's meeting with a printout in his hand, "we are three weeks behind on the Bishop launch, and I would like someone to explain to me how that happened."

"It happened because you moved the venue twice," Charlotte said, not even glancing up from her laptop.

"I moved the venue because the first one flooded."

"The first one flooded because you booked a marquee company that doesn't do proper drainage checks. I told you that back in March."

"You told me a lot of things in March. I can't remember every single one."

"You should remember that one. It cost us eleven grand."

Freddie, sitting sideways in his chair with his feet up on another one, watched this like it was the best television he'd seen all year. "Should I be taking notes," he said, "or is this just for fun."

"Nobody asked you," Edward and Charlotte said at the same time, and then looked at each other, surprised, because two months ago that kind of accidental agreement would have felt strange. Now it barely registered.

That was the thing about the last two months. Somewhere between the Aldridge wedding and now, the three of them had settled into something that looked less like chaos and more like a rhythm, even if it was a rhythm made mostly out of arguing. Edward had learned, slowly and a little painfully, that a spreadsheet could not fix everything. Charlotte had learned, even more slowly, that Edward's endless planning sometimes actually caught problems before they became disasters. And Freddie had learned, to his own surprise, that being taken seriously felt good, even when it came with people constantly checking his math.

Their father barely showed up anymore. That was new too. In the first month, Richard had dropped by twice a week, hovering near the edges of meetings with his coffee, saying nothing, watching everything. Lately he just called Edward once a week for a five minute update, said "sounds fine" no matter what Edward told him, and hung up. Edward found this more unsettling than the visits had been. At least when Richard watched, you knew where you stood.

"He's testing us less," Charlotte said one evening, the two of them the last ones in the office, going through invoices. "Or maybe he's just tired."

"Or maybe he's already decided," Edward said.

"Decided what?"

"Whether we're going to make it or not."

Charlotte looked up from her screen. "You really think he already knows?"

"I think Dad's known everything about us since we were about seven years old. I don't think six months is really about finding anything out. I think it's about seeing if we figure it out too."

Charlotte didn't have an answer for that one. She just went back to the invoices, quieter than before.

The real trouble started with the Okafor account, a big corporate client who wanted a product launch for their new skincare line, the kind of event that could bring in enough money to make the rest of the year easy, or enough disaster to make the rest of the year very hard. Freddie pitched the concept. Charlotte built it out. Edward handled the budget. On paper it should have worked perfectly, three people, three jobs, no overlap.

In real life, it fell apart almost immediately.

"You cut the budget for the lighting designer," Freddie said, standing in Edward's doorway on a Thursday afternoon, holding his phone like it had personally offended him. "The whole concept depends on the lighting. That's the entire idea."

"The budget was too high. I brought it down to something sensible."

"Sensible doesn't win the client, Edward. The idea wins the client. You can't just quietly gut the idea and call it sensible."

"I didn't gut anything, I adjusted it—"

"You cut it in half."

Charlotte appeared in the doorway behind Freddie, arms crossed. "Can I just say, calmly, that I warned both of you this would happen if you didn't loop me in before changing numbers."

"I did loop you in," Edward said.

"You sent me an email at eleven at night with the subject line 'FYI' and no other context. That is not looping someone in, that is throwing information at a wall and hoping it sticks."

"I was busy."

"We're all busy, Edward, that's the whole point."

It went on like that for another twenty minutes, voices rising, old sibling habits creeping back in, Edward getting stiffer and more clipped, Charlotte getting sharper, Freddie getting quieter in that way he did right before he either said something surprisingly wise or just left the room entirely. This time he left the room.

He didn't come back the next day either.

"He's not answering his phone," Charlotte said Friday afternoon, standing by Edward's desk with her own phone in her hand, worry written all over her face even though she was clearly trying to hide it. "He's not answering texts. Nothing."

Edward felt something cold settle in his stomach, something that had nothing to do with the Okafor budget at all. "He does this sometimes. Disappears for a bit."

"Not usually for two days, Edward."

"...No. Not usually."

They found him that evening at their mother's old flat, the one nobody had sold after she passed, the one Freddie had somehow ended up with the spare key to, sitting on the floor of the empty living room with a takeaway box he hadn't touched, looking about ten years younger than he actually was.

"You could have just called," Charlotte said gently, sitting down next to him on the floor, Edward hovering awkwardly by the door, unsure whether to sit or stand or say something or say nothing at all.

"I didn't want to talk," Freddie said. "I just wanted to sit somewhere that felt like hers for a bit."

Nobody said anything for a while. The flat still had a few of their mum's things in it, an old lamp, some photos nobody had gotten around to boxing up, a smell that even after all these years still felt exactly like her.

"I know you two think I don't take this seriously," Freddie said eventually, quiet, staring at the takeaway box. "I know that's what everyone's always thought. That I'm the one who shows up late with a stupid idea and doesn't really care either way."

"That's not what I think," Charlotte said.

"It's kind of what you both think." He wasn't angry when he said it, just tired. "And maybe I let you think it, because it's easier than actually trying and getting told I'm wrong. Dad never let me near anything important growing up. Said I'd get bored halfway through. So I never really got the chance to prove otherwise. It's easier to just be the funny one. Nobody expects anything from the funny one."

Edward finally sat down too, on Freddie's other side, feeling strangely useless in a way spreadsheets had never prepared him for. "I cut the lighting budget without asking you," he said. "That was wrong. I should have talked to you first."

"You should have," Freddie agreed, but there wasn't much heat in it anymore.

"I think," Edward said slowly, working it out as he spoke, "that I've been so scared of failing at this that I've been treating both of you like problems to manage instead of like people I actually trust. And I'm sorry for that."

Charlotte looked at her older brother like she wasn't sure she'd heard him right. "That's the most human sentence you've said in two months, Edward."

"Don't make this weird."

"I'm not making it weird, I'm just saying, write that one down somewhere, it might not happen again."

Freddie laughed, actually laughed, and something in the room loosened, just a little.

They fixed the Okafor launch together after that, properly together this time, Freddie's lighting idea restored with a compromise on the budget that Edward actually discussed with both of them first, Charlotte smoothing over the client relationship, all three of them staying late two nights in a row eating cold pizza on the office floor because none of them wanted to be the one who went home first.

The launch, when it finally happened, went well. Not perfectly. The lighting designer arrived forty minutes late and nearly gave Edward a heart attack, and one of the models needed a very last minute confidence boost from Freddie right before walking out, but it went well, well enough that the client mentioned booking them again for next year before the night was even over.

Richard came, this time, and stayed the whole event, which he hadn't done since the very first week.

"Four months to go," he said afterward, standing with all three of his kids near the exit as the last guests trickled out, sounding almost like he wasn't sure what to make of what he'd just watched.

"We know," Edward said.

"You're actually talking to each other now. Properly, I mean. Not just working around each other."

"We had a rough patch," Charlotte said.

"Everyone has rough patches," Richard said. "The question was never whether you'd have one. It was what you'd do once you did."

He didn't say much else after that, just nodded once, in a way that felt like more than it looked like, and left them standing there in the emptying room.

"Do you think that was him admitting he's proud of us," Freddie asked, once their father had gone.

"With Dad, you can never really tell," Edward said.

"I think it was," Charlotte said quietly. "I think that was about as close as he gets."

Freddie slung an arm around each of them, something he hadn't done since they were kids, and for once neither of them shrugged it off.

"Four months left," he said. "Let's not ruin it now."

"Speak for yourself," Charlotte said. "You're the one who almost got us sued in the first month."

"That was one time."

"It was three times, actually."

"Okay, fine, three times, but none of them actually happened, which I think should count for something."

Edward, walking between them toward the door, found himself laughing before he even realized he was doing it, and thought, not for the first time, that maybe this was what his father had been testing all along. Not whether the business could survive. Whether they could.