Chapter 29 Drowning
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Drowning
“Sir?”
Nick’s voice reverberated from far away—muffled—as if speaking under water.
“Sir?”
Jack stared at the swirling text on the page. Detached words floating. Muscles too heavy to move. Eyes too still to blink. He sat in a sort of paralysis, book in hand, clothed, but he wasn’t there. Just his mind. His ceaseless mind and the echoes of her screams that never faded.
“Jack, you have a phone call.”
Slowly, he looked up at Nick, staring from the doorway of his study, and frowned. “How long have you been standing there?”
Concern flashed in his eyes. He lifted the phone to his ear. “Mr. Thorne will have to call you back.” He clicked off the phone and sighed. “Jack, maybe you should talk to someone.”
He didn’t want to talk to anyone. He wanted to talk to her.
Two weeks dissolved like smoke. Fourteen days of sitting in the same chair, in the same study, reading the same page of a book he couldn’t absorb.
The fire had long since gone cold. Grey ash settled over the hearth like the residue of something cremated.
His bourbon sat untouched on the side table, the amber liquid catching what little light bled through the curtains he refused to open.
He was a master of secrets. A manipulator. A choreographing maestro who conducted nightmares for some and wet dreams for others. A sick, twisted fuck who played jazz over people’s screams. A blemish. A lie. A coward who hid behind masks and balconies.
Jack learned early in life, he could scream until his throat bled and no savior would come. For years, the chancellor’s servants moved like ghosts, deaf and blind to the suffering of a child.
So he learned to suffocate hope before it could breathe.
Learned to live without expectation the way a body learns to live without a limb.
Learned not to reach for what wasn’t there.
Until her.
She crawled under his skin and rearranged every defense he spent decades constructing. Dismantled him with the efficiency of someone who didn’t know her own power, and when the dust settled, when she finally saw the monster he warned her of, none of it mattered.
Nick lingered in the doorway, backlit by the hall. His posture carried the same patient authority it always had.
“Jack—”
“Leave me alone.”
Nick stepped into the study with quiet defiance. Not the obedient retreat of a man following orders. “Jack. Please.” His voice roughened at the edges. “You can talk to me.”
“You wouldn’t understand.”
Nick lowered himself into the leather chair across from Jack’s desk without waiting for permission.
His hands settled on the armrests, fingers loose.
“I know you better than anyone, Jack.” He leaned forward, elbows on his knees, resembling the tutor who once sat on the floor, teaching a brutalized boy the names of constellations so he’d have something beautiful to hold when the dark pressed in.
“I’ve watched you defeat giants.” His voice carried the low, measured weight of a man choosing each word carefully.
“Even as a boy, you stood up to those twice your size. What makes you think you can’t conquer this? ”
Jack’s throat constricted. The silence that followed was heavy enough to bruise.
Something shifted behind his sternum, cracking wider under the pressure of Nick’s faith.
His mouth opened. Closed. The muscles in his jaw trembled. “I can’t face her.”
Nick didn’t move. Didn’t rush to fill the silence with comfort or platitudes.
“Then you wait. The people in this world that love you will find you, Jack.”
“She doesn’t love me.”
Nick was quiet for a long time. Then he rose from the chair.
He paused with his hand on the frame. “I’ll hold your calls.”
Days bled into one another. Grey mornings into dreary afternoons into darker nights.
The curtains stayed drawn, and trays arrived and left untouched. The locket lived in his hand now, small and tarnished. He traced the dented surface with his thumb, memorizing imperfections he already knew by heart. It was the only tangible thing keeping him tethered to her.
Two soft raps sounded from the door. Jack slipped the locket into his breast pocket. “Come.”
Myrtle appeared at the threshold with a tray balanced on one arm and a look of disappointment that could curdle milk. Her copper hair, threaded now with silver, was pinned in its usual no-nonsense twist.
The untouched tray from that morning sat where she’d left it.
“Right.” She set the fresh tray on his desk with a deliberate clatter. “I’m tired of wasting food, Jack. Another meal, into the rubbish. Same as yesterday’s. And the day before that.”
Jack said nothing. His gaze drifted back to drawn curtains where a sliver of light leaked through. He waited for nightfall, wanting nothing more than to sleep.
“I won’t have it!” Her voice carried the sharp certainty of a woman who’d spent a lifetime refusing to be ignored. “You’re not eating. You’re not sleeping properly. You’re sitting in this room like a man waiting to be buried, and I won’t stand here and watch it happen.”
She stepped closer. “I know you like your space. God knows, I’ve learned that much. But this isn’t space. This is punishment.” She glared at him, then her voice cracked, “Please, Jack.”
She pressed her lips together and blinked hard, composing herself with the practiced efficiency of a woman who learned long ago that tears were a luxury.
“I can’t bear to see you like this. If you could just…tell us how to help you.”
He looked at her, but her lifeless expression didn’t shift. “No one can help me.”
Myrtle’s chin lifted as something ignited behind her eyes.
Not pity. Conviction. “No. I refuse to accept that.” She planted her feet stubbornly.
“You were near dead when you fell into my life. Skin and bone and bruises with barely a pulse to speak of. I nursed you back. Sat with you through fevers that should’ve killed you, cleaned wounds I couldn’t look at without cryin’ into the basin after.
I didn’t give up on you then, and I won’t give up on you now.
” Her jaw tightened, and her voice dropped to a tremor.
“But God help me, I can’t handle a man who gives up on ‘imself.”
When enough seconds passed to confirm he wasn’t going to speak, she huffed and turned on her heel.
“You were more of a mother to me than my own Mum.”
Myrtle stopped, one hand resting on the doorframe, spine pulled taut. She didn’t turn to face him.
The silence needed time to breathe.
“Do you remember the day I finally went back home?”
She gave an almost invisible nod as her fingers whitened against the frame.
“I found her lying in her own waste.” His voice carried no inflection, flat as a coroner reading his findings.
“I was so naive. Even then, after years of suffering through the nightmare she created, I clung to the fact that she was my mother. That I was a part of her. And mums are meant to protect their children.” His throat tightened.
“Even if it means sacrificing themselves.”
Myrtle’s hand trembled into a fist against the doorframe.
“I don’t know what I expected to find in that rotting old flat.
Compassion? Relief?” He remembered the last time he opened that battered door and the stench of hunger that greeted him.
“When she saw me, she looked at me like one of the rats. Like something that stole from her and crawled out from a crack.”
Myrtle turned, tears glistened in her weathered eyes. Her chin wobbled. “Jack—”
“They came to see her.” His voice hollowed. “Left a number for her to call.”
Myrtle’s eyes closed. Her chest rose with a single controlled breath as the meaning settled.
“She was going to turn me in.” The words surfaced like something dredged from deep water. “Her own son.”
A tear spilled down Myrtle’s cheek, tracing the deep lines that decades of living had carved into her skin.
“That was when I knew she never loved me.” His hand clenched.
“I just didn’t know how to accept it.” A challenge that still tormented him today.
“I burned that paper with the number, thinking it would somehow banish the pain of her betrayal—” His voice broke.
He knocked his fist against the hard bone of his chest, where most of the pain was buried.
“But it never leaves.” He looked up at her, his vision blurred and ruined. “I can’t fit any more pain—”
“Oh, Jack.” She crossed the room in four quick strides and pulled him into her arms. His face pressed into her shoulder.
Her fingers gripped the back of his head.
Fierce. Unyielding. “I’m so sorry, love.
” Her whisper fractured against his hair.
“You deserve so much better than what this world’s given you. ”
A tremor moved through him, escaping in a wet exhalation. He pressed his face deeper, into her neck, where her familiar scent was strongest.
A hug.
He sobbed. “Oh, God, Myrtle. Why? Why am I this way?”
“It’s not your fault, love. Not your fault.
” She pulled back and brushed his hair away from his face so she could look him in the eyes.
“Sometimes the world is a terrible, cruel place, beyond all reason.” She cupped his face in her palms, forcing him to hear what she had to say.
“But you have to keep looking up, love. You have to.”
His jaw trembled as they cried together over such bitter truths.
“We have a duty to see that the sun still comes up.” Her words broke like crashing waves, spilling out in whimpers and tears.
“Breathe when the air is fresh and cool. Stop for the flowers when they bloom and laugh at the foolish things nature gets up to when nobody’s watching.
” Her thumbs traced his cheekbones, wiping away his tears.
“We have to keep witnessing the good, Jack, so the bad don’t swallow us whole. ”
She held his gaze with the steady, unshakable certainty of a woman who survived her own horrors and chose, every single day, to find the light anyway.