Chapter 4 Jack
Jack
I barely remembered the drive here. Pauline Wells was in California, and the only person who could fill in the details was Claudette.
I climbed out of the car.
The house was nice—modern but warm, lots of natural light, the kind of place that looked like a home rather than a showroom.
Michael had done well for himself, and more importantly, he made my sister happy.
I had given him hell because that was my job, because Claudette was my baby sister and no man would ever be good enough for her, but somewhere along the way I had started to acknowledge that I couldn’t have had a better brother-in-law.
Not that I would ever tell him that.
I knocked on the door like a civilized person. Waited. Counted to ten. Knocked again, harder this time, because patience had never been my strong suit and today it was hanging by a thread.
The door swung open and Michael stood there in a wrinkled T-shirt and sweatpants, hair sticking up in every direction.
I absolutely did not want to think about what he’d been doing.
“Jack.” He blinked at me like I was a hallucination. “You good?”
He stared at me for a long moment, clearly waiting for an explanation. I didn’t offer one. After a beat, he sighed and stepped aside to let me in, but not before positioning himself in the doorway in a way that felt distinctly territorial.
It should have annoyed me. But it didn’t.
This was a man who would protect my sister. Who would stand between her and anything that threatened her peace. I had watched him sit by her bedside during the worst of her illness.
He loved her. Not the way men in our circle loved their wives, as accessories or status symbols, but I could see how much Claudette meant to him.
I gave him a short nod as I passed. An approval I would never say out loud but hoped he understood.
“Hello to you too,” he muttered, closing the door behind me. “Claudette’s in the kitchen. Try not to start anything—we just got the good china unpacked and I’d hate to see it become a casualty.”
I was already walking past him before he finished the sentence.
Claudette was perched on the kitchen counter with her bare feet swinging, eating ice cream straight from the container. She looked up when I walked in and her face split into a grin.
“Well, well. Look who came.” She waved her spoon at me. “If you’re here to threaten Michael again—”
“I’m not here about Michael.”
“That’s a refreshing change.” She dug into the ice cream again, watching me with sharp curiosity, even as a kid—nothing got past Claudette.
“So what’s the occasion? Is something wrong?”
I leaned against the doorframe, trying to figure out how to say this. I had rehearsed the conversation in my head the entire drive over, but now that I was here, the words felt too loaded.
There was no good way to ask what I needed to ask.
“I ran into someone yesterday,” I said.
“Fascinating. Do go on.”
“Pauline Wells.”
Claudette’s spoon stopped halfway to her mouth.
Her eyes went wide, then narrow, and suddenly she looked less like my baby sister and more like a predator sizing up a threat.
The transformation was instantaneous—one second she was a woman eating ice cream on the counter, the next she was a wall I wasn’t sure I could breach.
“Oh,” she said. “Interesting.” Her tone suggested it was anything but.
I pushed off from the doorframe and crossed the kitchen toward her. Claudette watched my approach with wariness, the spoon still suspended in midair.
“Claudette. I need to talk to you about her.”
She held my gaze for a long moment, and I watched the walls go up behind her eyes. She was protecting Pauline. From me.
That shouldn’t have hurt as much as it did.
“I just want to make things right,” I said quietly.
“That’s all. I’m not trying to cause trouble, I’m not trying to insert myself into her life uninvited.
But something went wrong between us, something I still don’t understand, and I’ve spent seven years not understanding it. I think I deserve to know what I did.”
She set the ice cream container down on the counter beside her and studied me with an expression I couldn’t quite read.
“You really don’t know,” she said slowly. “Do you?”
“Would I be here, subjecting myself to Michael’s bedhead, if I did?”
The corner of her mouth twitched in a smile.
“Okay, I’ll hear you out,” she said. “Come on.”
She hopped off the counter and led me through the house to the living room—big windows overlooking a small backyard. I sat down in an armchair while she curled up on the couch across from me, tucking her legs underneath her like a cat settling in.
“Talk,” she said.
“You already know what I want to talk about.”
“I want to hear you say it.”
“I need to know what happened. With Pauline. With us.”
“She never told me everything,” Claudette said. “But I know you hurt her and she spent years putting herself back together.”
“How?” The word came out with confusion. “How did I hurt her? I never meant to—I would never have—”
“Then you should probably figure out what you did.”
“She won’t talk to me. Yesterday she practically sprinted to her car to get away from me.”
“Can you blame her?”
No. I couldn’t. That was the worst part—I couldn’t blame her for anything, because I didn’t know what I was supposed to be blamed for. I had replayed those final weeks a thousand times in my head, searching for the moment everything went wrong, and I still came up empty.
“I asked her to be with me,” I said quietly. “Right before I graduated. She said no. And then she just… disappeared.”
Claudette’s eyebrows rose. “That’s all? You asked and she said no?”
“That’s all. She didn’t give me a reason. She just froze me out—wouldn’t return my calls, wouldn’t see me, wouldn’t talk to me. I told myself I hadn’t done anything wrong.”
“And now?”
“Now I don’t know what to think.” I stared at a spot on the floor, unable to look at her.
“I thought I could move on, but the last few months proved that was a lie. It doesn’t matter how much time has passed—I still can’t.
” The words came out strained recalling how she had tried to distance herself from me back in Vegas.
I could feel my sister weighing her loyalties, calculating what she could share without betraying Pauline’s trust. It was the same calculation I made in business deals, and I hated seeing it applied to my own family.
“She’s working at California Times,” Claudette said finally. “She transferred from a paper in Newark to be closer to her grandmother.”
My head came up. “Margaret’s sick?”
“Yes.” Her voice went soft. “It’s serious, Jack.”
That hit me somewhere I hadn’t expected. Margaret Wells, with her church hats and her warm smile and the way she had looked at me the one time Pauline brought me to visit—like she was seeing something in me that I couldn’t see myself. She had made me feel welcome and told me to come back anytime.
“I didn’t know,” I said.
“Now you do.” Claudette uncurled from the couch and stood, looking down at me with an expression caught somewhere between love and warning. “Jack, you’re my brother and I will always love you. But Pauline is my family too. If you hurt her again—”
“I won’t.”
Claudette studied me for a long moment. Then she sighed, reached up, and patted my cheek the way she used to when we were kids and she was pretending to be the older sibling.
“Don’t make me regret telling you,” she said.
She walked out of the room without looking back.
The penthouse was too quiet when I got there. Too big. Too empty.
I poured myself a drink and sat in my study, watching the afternoon light creep across the floor.
Pauline Wells.
Her name had lived in the back of my mind like a splinter I couldn’t quite dig out.
I had dated other women since her—but none of them had ever made me feel the way she did. None of them had ever looked at me and seen something beyond the money and the name and the expectations.
Pauline had seen me. The real me. And for a while, I had let myself believe that was enough.
I remembered the first time I really noticed her. Not as Claudette’s friend, or as a guest in our house, but as *Pauline*.
It was at a summer party during her freshman year. Everyone was out by the pool performing for each other—showing off their wealth and connections. And there she was, curled up in a lounge chair with a thick paperback, completely oblivious to all of it. Completely unimpressed.
I had fallen for her like a man stepping off a cliff. The descent was slow enough to be terrifying and too fast to stop.
She made me laugh. Made me think. And definitely made me want to be better than I was.
A better man than my family expected and the spoiled rich kid everyone assumed I would become.
When I was with her, I felt like I could be anyone. Do anything. Like the weight of my last name didn’t have to define me.
And the way she talked about the things she loved…
True crime. She’d been obsessed with it—podcasts, documentaries, those thick books about serial killers she devoured like novels.
I used to tease her about it, ask if she was planning to murder someone and needed tips on getting away with it.
She would roll her eyes and throw a pillow at my head and then spend the next two hours explaining exactly why the Golden State Killer case was the most fascinating criminal investigation of the twentieth century.
I hadn’t cared about any of it. Not at first. But I cared about her, and that meant I cared about the things that lit her up from the inside.
One night—it must have been junior year, she had shown up at my apartment with her laptop and a bag of popcorn and announced that we were watching a documentary about a cult in Oregon.
“A cult,” I’d repeated, skeptical.
“Trust me.” She’d already made herself comfortable on my couch, feet tucked under her, laptop balanced on her knees. “It’s fascinating. They had a fleet of Rolls-Royces. Like, ninety of them.”
“That does sound like a lot of Rolls-Royces.”
“Right? Now shut up and watch.”
So I had. I’d sat beside her in the dark with the laptop screen flickering between us, watching her face more than the documentary—the way her eyes went wide at the revelations, how she leaned forward during the tense parts, the way she whispered “I knew it” under her breath when a twist confirmed her suspicions.
Somewhere around hour three, she’d fallen asleep against my shoulder, her curls tickling my chin, and I’d stayed perfectly still for another forty minutes because I didn’t want to wake her.
I finished the documentary without her. Then I watched two more.
By the time she woke up, I was deep in a Wikipedia rabbit hole about cults, and she’d laughed at me for an entire minute straight.
“You’re hooked,” she had said, grinning. “I’ve created an addict.”
“You’ve created an informed citizen.”
“You just spent two hours reading about the Jonestown massacre.”
“Research.”
She had kissed me then, still laughing, her mouth curved against mine. “You’re such a weirdo,” she murmured. “I love it.”
I love it.
Not “I love you.” We’d never said that to each other—not directly.
But it was there in every look, every touch, every stolen moment.
I had felt it every time she smiled at me.
Every time she reached for my hand in the dark of a movie theater.
The way she fell asleep against my chest and trusted me to keep her safe.
I had kept our relationship secret. Not because I was ashamed—but because my friends were sharks in designer clothing, boys who measured their worth by the women they collected and discarded.
They would have looked at Pauline and seen a target. A challenge. Something to be won and ruined and bragged about over drinks.
I couldn’t stand the thought of their eyes on her. Hell, I couldn’t stomach the idea of them speculating about her, reducing her to another conquest. So I kept her separate, in a space that was just ours, where no one else could touch her.
I thought I was protecting her.
The night I asked her to be with me publicly—I thought I was finally doing the right thing. I wanted to walk into a room with her on my arm and let everyone see what I had known for years: that she was the most remarkable person I had ever met.
She’d looked at me like I’d said something monstrous instead of something true.
She said no.
Just no. No explanation. No softening. No second chance.
I had stood there in that hallway, confused and wounded, and she had walked away without looking back.
I spent the next few weeks trying to understand—calling her, texting her, showing up at places I knew she’d be. She avoided me like I was a disease. Eventually I stopped trying. Pride, maybe. Or self-preservation. Some combination of both that let me sleep at night.
I graduated before she did and focused on building my father’s company.
She graduated and moved to New Jersey and I told myself she was the one who gave up.
I told myself a lot of things.
Now I pulled out my laptop and typed “California Times” into the search bar.
The website loaded—sleek design, professional layout, the kind of publication that took itself seriously. I navigated to the staff page and scrolled until I found her.
Pauline Wells, Junior Reporter.
The photo was small, probably taken by someone who didn’t know how to capture the way her eyes lit up when she laughed. But it was her. Those curls. That warm brown skin. That mouth that always seemed on the verge of saying something clever or cutting or both.
She looked beautiful. Untouchable. Like every single thing I had lost and never understood why.
I stared at the photo as seconds ticked by.
Then I started looking at the company itself. Ownership structure. Financial reports. Recent acquisitions and restructuring.
I wasn’t sure what I was thinking. But my fingers kept moving across the keyboard, pulling data, running numbers, building a picture of a company that was ripe for acquisition.
By midnight, I had a folder full of research and a plan that was either brilliant or insane.
Probably insane. Definitely insane.