Chapter 35 OWEN
OWEN
This was Reid’s idea. He said it would help.
Get outside. Move. Burn off the static that's been building in the cabin for seven days, the particular tension of three men occupying a house that lately only had meaning with four.
So here I am. Feet set.
Jace hits the pads I'm holding and the impact travels through the foam into my wrists, up my forearms and I absorb it. I welcome the discomfort it causes.
He's not training. He's punishing.
Every strike comes harder than the last. His form, which is usually clean, the natural economy of someone who grew up fighting and learned later to channel it, has deteriorated over the past ten minutes into something rawer. He's throwing with his shoulders instead of rotating through his hips.
I read the pattern in his strikes the way I read patterns in everything.
The jab-jab-cross is frustration. The hooks to the body are helplessness.
The uppercuts, which are coming with increasing velocity, are grief compressed into acceleration, force, and the specific intention of making the person holding the pads feel what the person throwing the punches is feeling.
I feel it. My wrists ache. My forearms are burning. And underneath the physical, I can read the secondary layer: Jace blames me.
He hasn't said it. He doesn't need to. It's in the angle of his shots, in the way his eyes meet mine between combinations, in the particular quality of aggression that is personal rather than athletic.
He blames me because I mentioned the morality clause.
Because I laid the financial exposure on the table at the worst possible moment, when Maya was already fracturing, when the revelation of our wealth had already shaken her trust, when the last thing she needed was one more reason to believe that staying with us would destroy what we'd built.
He's not wrong. In theory.
In practice, everyone at that table needed the full picture.
That's how I operate. That's what I bring to this family.
The complete analysis, the variables identified, the risks quantified.
I don't withhold information because the timing is inconvenient.
I didn't build a company's financial architecture by telling people only what they wanted to hear.
But Maya isn't a financial architecture.
Jace throws a right cross that I see coming from a mile away, then changes level. The uppercut I don't see coming. Not fully. I get the pads down late and the impact glances off the foam and catches the bottom of my chin and my head snaps back and for a second the world spins.
I reset. Roll my jaw. It's not broken. But It's going to bruise.
Jace doesn't apologize. His eyes are flat. Waiting.
"Is there something on your mind you'd like to share," I say, "or are you going to keep expressing yourself with your fists?"
He bounces on his toes. Doesn't answer.
I should stop there. I should take the hit and wait for Jace to come down from whatever altitude his rage has taken him to.
But I am hurt. I have been hurt for seven days. I have been sitting in an office that smells like her pencils and her lavender soap, staring at a desk that has her sketchpad still open on it, and I have been doing what I always do, which is processing in silence.
"I thought you'd left Jace the Thug behind," I say.
The words leave my mouth and I know immediately that I just made a mistake.
Jace stops bouncing.
His jaw clenches. His gloves drop to his sides. His eyes lock on mine with an intensity that has nothing to do with sparring.
Then he comes at me.
Not a punch. He tackles me. Full body, shoulder to my sternum, driving me backward off my feet. The pads fly. My back hits the packed dirt and the air leaves my lungs and Jace is on top of me, forearm across my chest, his face inches from mine.
"Take it back."
"Jace..." My voice is compressed. His weight on my chest makes the word thin.
"Take it back."
Reid's hands are on Jace's shoulders. Not gentle. The grip of a man who has pulled apart fights before and knows exactly how much force the situation requires.
"Enough." Reid's voice is the one that ends arguments. "Get off him. Now."
Jace doesn't move. His forearm presses harder. His eyes are wet and furious.
"I'm sorry," Meaning it completely.
Something shifts in his face. The rage flickers. Doesn't disappear, but loosens its grip, the way a muscle cramp releases not all at once but in stages.
Reid pulls him back. Jace lets himself be pulled. He stands, strips his gloves, throws them at the floor. His chest is heaving. Sweat drips from his jaw into the dirt.
Reid stands between us. The referee position, the mediator position, the position he's occupied between us for fourteen years. He looks tired. Not the physical kind. The kind that settles behind the eyes of a man who has been holding things together for too long.
"This isn't helping," Reid says. "Fighting each other isn't going to bring her back."
Jace wipes his face with the back of his hand. He's looking at the ground. When he speaks, the anger has burned down to something rawer underneath.
"You dropped the moral clause on her when everything was already falling apart. She was already scared. She was already pulling away. And you gave her one more reason to believe that being with us would destroy everything we built."
There it is. The blame, placed. Clear and specific and aimed with the same precision I just used against him.
I sit up in the dirt. My jaw throbs. My back aches where I hit the ground. I look at Jace and I don't defend myself because there is no defense.
"You're right," I say.
Jace looks at me. Surprised that I'm not arguing.
"The timing was wrong. I should have waited. I should have found a different way to point it out." I pause. "But everyone needed to know what was at stake."
Jace shakes his head in frustration. The frustration of a man who knows the logic is sound and hates that it is.
"It's not Owen's fault," Reid states. "Maya was putting distance between us before the clause came up. Before telling us the truth. Before any of it. She decided to leave the moment those men showed up in the driveway. Everything after that was exit strategy."
The wind moves through the pines. Somewhere down the valley, a bird calls. The sound is too bright for the conversation.
"The question," Reid says, "is what we do about it."
Jace steps forward. The rapid forward motion of a man who would rather act than think. "We go after her. We go to LA. We tell her we don't care about the deal, we don't care about what is online. We just care about her."
Reid nods slowly in consideration. "I don’t know if that’s the right move. She has so much already on her plate with her father's situation… And she didn't reply to any of our calls or messages."
"So what, we just stand here? Doing nothing?"
The question sits in the air. Three men in a sparring ring with dirt on their clothes and bruises forming and no opponent that can be fought with fists.
I've been thinking about this for seven days. While Jace paced and Reid went still and the cabin emptied itself of everything that made it a home, I sat at my desk and did what I do. I came up with a plan.
"I think I might have an idea," I say. "On how to fix this."
Jace turns. Reid lifts his head. Both of them look at me, standing in the dirt with a bruised jaw and a sore back and quiet certainty.
The wind settles. The valley is still.
And for the first time since Maya left, the silence doesn't feel like absence.
It feels like the moment before taking action.