17. Jarec
— ? —
Jarec
The house has become a mausoleum.
I move through its rooms like a man haunting his own life - past the dining room where she ate alone, past the kitchen where I bandaged her finger, past the bathroom I can no longer enter without feeling the ghost of her body pressed against mine.
The staff exchanges worried glances when they think I’m not looking.
My assistant has stopped asking if I’m alright and started leaving meals outside my study door, untouched plates retrieved hours later.
I don’t care.
The only things that feel real anymore are the two paintings that bookend my existence: the portrait she made of me, propped against the wall near the window where I can see it when I look up from my desk, and Arrangement, leaning opposite it, that violent red wound bisecting all the cold blue.
Between them, I sit. I drink. I write.
The list of failures grows longer every day.
Pages now, a catalog of sins I’m only beginning to understand the weight of.
Every time I think I’ve captured the full scope of what I did to her, I remember something else - a dismissive word, a canceled dinner, a moment when I could have reached for her and chose instead to turn away.
The way she looked at me the morning after the storm, hopeful and wary, and I pretended I had somewhere to be.
The charity gala where Victoria announced she was staying indefinitely, and I said nothing. Did nothing.
Every single night she left her door unlocked.
That last one haunts me most. She told me, that final night in the study. Every night since I moved into this house, I waited.
She waited. And I made her wait alone.
***
The club is quiet at this hour.
I came here to escape the house, to escape the paintings that watch me like accusations, to escape the silence that presses against my ears like water. But the leather chairs and crystal decanters offer no comfort. I’m three whiskeys in and no closer to peace.
Victoria finds me like a shark scenting blood.
She slides into the chair across from mine with the easy confidence of someone who has never been denied, crossing her legs beneath the hem of a dress that probably cost more than most people’s monthly rent.
Her smile is practiced, sympathetic, designed to convey concern while broadcasting something else entirely.
“You look terrible,” she says.
“I’m fine.”
“You’re not. You’ve canceled every social obligation for the past three weeks. You’ve stopped returning calls. The rumor mill is working overtime trying to figure out what’s wrong with Jarec Fairweather.” She leans forward, places a manicured hand on my knee. “Let me help.”
I look at her hand. At her face. At the calculating gleam in her eyes that I once mistook for passion, for genuine feeling, for anything other than what it actually is: hunger dressed up as affection.
“Help with what?”
“With forgetting her.” Victoria’s voice drops, intimate and inviting. “We were good together, Jarec. Before your father’s debt got in the way. Before that girl showed up with her dying father’s bargain. We can be good together again.”
The whiskey burns in my stomach. The room feels smaller than it did a moment ago, the air thicker.
“Don’t touch me.”
Victoria’s smile falters. “Jarec-”
“I said don’t touch me.” I stand, step back, and for the first time see her clearly.
The manipulation underneath the polish. The calculation behind every gesture.
Whatever poison she fed Elizabeth, whatever lies she used to drive her away, I can trace all of it back to this woman and her desperate need to reclaim something that was never hers.
“What did you tell her?”
Victoria’s expression flickers. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Elizabeth. What did you show her? What did you say?”
“I told her the truth.” Victoria’s voice hardens, the mask slipping. “That you and I-”
“There is no you and I.” The words come out flat, final, carrying a weight I’ve never put behind them before. “There hasn’t been for years. Whatever you showed her, whatever lies you fed her, whatever scheme you and my mother cooked up between you - you are done.”
“You’re being dramatic, darling.” But there’s nervousness beneath the polish now. “I never-”
“I don’t know exactly what you did.” I lean in close enough to see her pupils dilate. “But I know she was fine until you crawled back into this town, and I know you’ve spent every day since trying to take something that was never yours. That ends now.”
Victoria goes pale.
“Stay away from me.” I straighten, keeping my voice low and lethal.
“Stay away from her. If I find out you’ve contacted Elizabeth again, if you so much as speak her name in company where it might get back to her, I will destroy you socially in ways you cannot imagine.
Every door this family has ever opened for you will close.
Every invitation will dry up. Every hostess in Rhode Island will suddenly find that her guest list is too full to accommodate Victoria Glover. ”
“We’re done here.”
I walk out without looking back.
Behind me, Victoria’s face twists with fury - but she doesn’t follow.
***
My mother summons me to the family estate three days later.
I consider ignoring the request. The thought of sitting across from Esther, enduring her pointed remarks and calculated cruelties, feels like more than I can bear right now.
But refusing would require explanations I don’t have the energy to give, and some part of me - some angry, grieving part - wants to confront her.
The dining room is set for two, crystal and silver gleaming on white linen, the long table stretching between us like a battlefield. Esther sits at the head, resplendent in pale silk, watching me take my seat with the expression of a woman who has never once doubted her own importance.
“You look unwell,” she says, cutting her steak with surgical precision. “Have you been sleeping?”
“No.”
“You should see someone about that. Sleep deprivation affects judgment, and you have responsibilities. The business. The family name. Things that matter more than moping over a girl who was never suited for you.”
I don’t rise to the bait. Not yet.
“I assume you heard about Victoria,” I say instead.
“I heard you made a scene at the club.” Esther’s knife pauses, then resumes its careful work. “Creating gossip, Jarec. That’s beneath you.”
“I told her we were done. That I never want to see her again. That if she contacts Elizabeth in any way, I’ll destroy her socially.”
“Dramatic.” Esther sips her wine, unbothered. “And unnecessary. Victoria understands discretion. Whatever disagreement you’ve had, it can be resolved quietly. The Glovers are still excellent allies, and Victoria would make a far more suitable-”
“You wanted her gone from the day I brought her home,” I say. “You made that clear at every dinner, every function, every chance you got to remind her she didn’t belong.”
Esther doesn’t bother to deny it. Her chin lifts. Cold. Imperious. Unrepentant.
“She was never right for this family.”
“That wasn’t your decision to make.”
“Of course it was.” She waves a hand, dismissive.
“I am your mother. I have devoted my entire life to ensuring the Fairweather name maintains its position, its influence, its power. And you repaid that devotion by marrying some nobody from nowhere, the daughter of a man your father happened to owe a debt, as if sentiment were more important than strategy.”
“It wasn’t sentiment.” My voice comes out rougher than I intended. “It was honor. Father owed her father his life. The least I could do was-”
“The least you could do was make a sensible match that advanced our interests. Instead, you let a dying man’s guilt dictate the most important decision of your life, and then you couldn’t even bring yourself to set the girl aside quietly when it became clear she didn’t belong.”
I stare at her. This woman who raised me. Who taught me that love was weakness and attachment was vulnerability. Who convinced me, before I was old enough to question it, that the safest thing was to never want anything too much.
“Victoria was never the one I wanted,” I say slowly. “She was just safe.”
Esther’s knife stills. “Safe?”
“Easy. Familiar. A transaction wrapped in the illusion of affection. Being with her was like wearing a costume - I never had to risk anything real because there was nothing real to risk.”
“That’s the point of a suitable match. Mutual benefit without the messiness of-”
“Elizabeth was terrifying.”
The words stop her mid-sentence.
“Because I knew from the moment I met her that she could destroy me. Not with cruelty or manipulation or any of the weapons you taught me to watch for. But by making me want things.” My voice cracks despite my efforts to control it.
“Real things. A real life. A real marriage. And I didn’t know how to want that without being terrified of losing it. ”
I push back from the table.
“So I pushed her away. Made her feel like nothing. And now I’ve lost her anyway, and it destroyed me anyway, and all I accomplished was hurting the one person who ever actually saw me.”
Esther sets down her wine glass with exaggerated care. “Love is a disease, Jarec. Your father loved me, and look where that got him. Dead at fifty-two, heart attack in his mistress’s bed. Love makes you weak. The sooner you cure yourself of it-”
“I’m done.”
She blinks. “Excuse me?”
“I’m done, Mother.” I stand, and my chair scrapes back against the marble floor with a sound like finality. “With this conversation. With your advice. With everything you think you know about what I need.”
“Where are you going?”
“To figure out how to be the man Elizabeth deserves. Instead of the one you raised.”
I leave her sitting alone at the long table, surrounded by crystal and silver and empty chairs.
The front door closes behind me with a sound like the end of something.
***
I drive back to my house.
Not the family estate - that place has never felt like mine. My house. The one where Elizabeth lived. The one where she waited for me every night while I found excuses to be anywhere else.
The study welcomes me with its familiar shadows. Arrangement watches from one wall. Her portrait of me watches from another. I pour myself a whiskey I don’t really want and stand between them, caught in the crossfire of her art.
Earn it, she said.
I think I finally understand what that means.
It doesn’t mean grand gestures. Doesn’t mean showing up on her doorstep with flowers and pretty speeches. Doesn’t mean trying to convince her with words that my actions have already contradicted a thousand times over.
It means becoming someone worthy of her. Someone who doesn’t run from wanting. Someone who can stand in the light instead of hiding in shadow.
Someone different from the man my mother raised.
I pull out my notebook. Turn to a fresh page.
At the top, I write: What would it mean to deserve her?
The list that follows is harder than the catalog of failures. Those came easily, sins I could name and number. But this - this is about becoming something I’ve never been.
Showing up. Being present. Choosing her in the daylight, not just in private moments of weakness.
Speaking, even when silence feels safer.
Letting her see me - really see me - instead of the armor I wear.
Accepting that love might hurt, and deciding that she’s worth the risk anyway.
I write until my hand cramps. Until the whiskey goes warm in its glass. Until the first gray light of dawn creeps through the windows and paints the paintings in softer tones.
And somewhere in the writing, something shifts inside me.
Not resolution - it’s too early for that. Not hope, exactly, because hope implies certainty I don’t have.
But determination. A quiet, stubborn refusal to accept that this is how our story ends.
I’m going to earn her back, I think, staring at the violent red slash across all that cold blue. I don’t know how. I don’t know how long it will take. I don’t know if she’ll even let me try.
But I’m going to become someone who deserves her. And then I’m going to spend the rest of my life proving it.
I close the notebook.
Set down the pen.
And begin, for the first time since she left, to plan.