“Great advice,” I mumbled as I scrolled through my emails. One was from Joshua with Henry’s itinerary and schedule for the next couple of months. I slumped onto the bench and opened the attachment, hoping to find he’d finally arranged a lunch or a meeting with someone I knew.

But no. Nothing. Although there was an entire week blocked out. Perhaps he was going on holiday?

“This is the guy who you want to buy the building in Mayfair from, right?”

“Yeah, I own every other piece of property in the row except that one—the most run-down of the lot of them, and he’s done nothing with it. It’s standing empty and prime for redevelopment. It’s prime for me redeveloping it.” It was a building I’d been obsessed with since I could remember.

“Look, worst case, you just work around it.”

I shook my head. “I don’t work around things. I take a wrecking ball to them.” I’d crunched the numbers. I wouldn’t make a profit if I didn’t have Henry’s building. And I didn’t take losses. And anyway, it wasn’t just the money.

It was the building my mother lived in when she found out she was pregnant with me.

It was the building my mother was evicted from as soon as her boyfriend, the owner of the building and my biological father, found out she was pregnant.

When he died, it had been inherited by a distant cousin, and since my mother told me the story when I was a teenager, I’d been laser-focused on buying that building. Maybe I thought if I owned it—owned what I should have inherited—wrongs would be righted.

Then I could tear it down and start again.

I’d rewrite history.

I studied the document Joshua had sent. Why had Henry blocked out an entire week? The man didn’t take holidays. I looked closer. The only reference in the entire week was M&K. I typed it into the search engine on my phone. What could M&K stand for? As I scrolled through the results, I couldn’t see how a furniture shop in Wigan or an American DJ could be relevant. Henry wasn’t just old money, he was titled—an earl or something, although he didn’t seem to use it. I was pretty sure he wasn’t shopping in Wigan or entertaining DJs.