Chapter 21- JADE
The days settle into something resembling normalcy.
I wake each morning to the sound of waves crashing against the shore and the warmth of Phoenix's body curved around mine.
We have coffee on the balcony, watching the sun climb over the Pacific while seagulls wheel and cry overhead.
He goes to the office, and I stay home, and when he returns in the evening, we cook dinner together or order in and watch movies on the enormous television.
It feels almost domestic. Almost safe.
I've started writing again.
My laptop sits open on the desk in Phoenix's study, which he's cleared out for me without being asked. The room smells like leather and old books. There’s something about being surrounded by his things while I work that makes the words come easier than they have in months.
The story that's pouring out of me is nothing like the quiet literary fiction I used to write.
Those atmospheric pieces about women staring out windows, contemplating their feelings, waiting for something to happen.
No, this is darker. A fantasy romance about a woman who falls in love with a monster and has to decide whether to save him or destroy him.
Whether the darkness inside him is contagious or if love can burn it away.
I don't examine too closely where the inspiration comes from.
Phoenix gives me space while I write. He used to hover, finding excuses to check on me, asking questions about what I was working on every few hours. Now he lets me disappear into the study for entire afternoons, only interrupting when dinner is ready or when he can't stand being apart any longer.
The change is subtle but unmistakable.
He still touches me constantly, his hand finding mine whenever we're in the same room, his lips brushing my temple as he passes behind my chair.
He still watches me with that intense focus that used to make me feel like prey.
But there's something softer in it now. Less possessive grip and more reverent holding.
He's trying. I can see how hard he's trying.
Some evenings, I catch him staring at his phone with a furrowed brow, typing messages he doesn't want me to see. When I ask what's wrong, he just shakes his head and pulls me closer, burying his face in my hair like he's trying to memorize my scent.
"My father is handling the situation," he told me once, when I finally gathered the courage to ask about Marcus. About the body in the mountains. About the investigation that must still be ongoing somewhere, detectives piecing together clues that could lead back to us.
I didn't ask what "handling" meant.
I don't want to know.
The ignorance feels like a shield, thin and fragile but better than nothing.
As long as I don't know the details, I can pretend I'm not complicit.
I can pretend I'm still the woman I was before all this started, the struggling writer with too much debt and too little hope who cashed a mysterious check and fell into a billionaire's orbit.
But that woman wouldn't recognize me now.
That woman never watched a man die and felt relieved instead of horrified and she never kissed the killer with blood still wet on his hands.
I'm different now. Changed in ways I'm still discovering.
The days blur together, each one a little easier than the last. I write three thousand words, then five thousand, then the story takes shape beneath my fingers and I lose track of how long I've been sitting at the desk.
Phoenix brings me food I forget to eat and coffee that goes cold while I chase the next scene.
He doesn't complain. He just refills my cup and drops a kiss on the top of my head and leaves me to my work.
At night, we come together like we're starving for each other.
Like the hours apart have been an eternity and only skin against skin can bridge the gap.
He worships my body with his hands and his mouth and his whispered confessions, telling me I'm beautiful, I'm perfect, I'm his.
And I believe him because I need to, because believing him is easier than examining the cracks in my own reflection.
Two weeks pass. Then three.
The detectives don't come back.
Phoenix tells me his father has "resources" that are making the investigation move in other directions. I picture men in suits manipulating evidence, bribing witnesses, constructing an alternate reality where Marcus Webb simply disappeared and the Crawfords had nothing to do with it.
I should be disgusted. I should be horrified by the casual corruption, the way money and power can bend the truth into whatever shape serves the family's interests.
Instead, I feel grateful.
Does that make me a monster too?
Late at night, when Phoenix is asleep beside me and the house is quiet except for the eternal rhythm of the waves, I lie awake and wonder who I'm becoming.
The woman in the mirror looks the same as she always has, dark hair and tired eyes and a face that's learned to hide what it's feeling.
But something underneath has shifted. Some essential part of my moral architecture has been rearranged to accommodate truths that would have destroyed me six months ago.
I watched a man die. I helped cover it up. I'm sleeping with the killer and eating breakfast on his balcony and writing love stories while his family erases the evidence of our crime.
And I'm happy.
That's the part I can't reconcile. Despite everything, despite the blood and the secrets and the compromises I've made with my conscience, I'm happier than I've ever been in my life.
Phoenix loves me in a way no one ever has before.
He sees the darkness in me and doesn't flinch.
He knows what I'm capable of and wants me anyway.
Maybe that's what scares me most.
Not that I've become someone new, but that this person was always inside me, waiting for permission to emerge. Maybe the woman I was before was the mask, and this version of me, the one who can compartmentalize murder and still find joy in morning coffee, is the real one.
I think about my mother sometimes. What she would say if she could see me now. She warned me about the Crawfords, about the way their world swallows people whole. She thought I would become like Olive, hollowed out and filled with someone else's desires.
But I don't feel hollow. I feel more solid than I've ever been.
I'm not Olive. Phoenix is not Nicholas. We're writing our own story, even if it's written in blood and secrets and the kind of love that burns rather than warms.
Phoenix stirs beside me, his arm tightening around my waist even in sleep. I press back against him, letting his warmth anchor me to the present moment.
The past is buried in the mountains.
The future is uncertain.
But right now, in this bed, in this house, in this life I never imagined I'd be living, I choose to believe we're going to be okay.
I close my eyes and match my breathing to his, letting the rhythm lull me toward sleep.
Tomorrow I'll write another chapter of my fantasy. Tomorrow I'll drink coffee on the balcony and pretend the world is exactly as simple as it looks.