18. Elizabeth #2
Victoria’s face twists with spite. “You haven’t spoken to me in weeks since that night.
You had me escorted out of your office. Do you know how humiliating that was?
I remember when we were younger, how everyone assumed we would marry, how our families planned - and now you throw it all away for this-”
“Call her anything other than her name,” Jarec says quietly, “and I will end you.”
Victoria’s mouth snaps shut. But the spite is still there, burning bright and reckless, and I can see the moment she decides to strike back the only way she has left.
“You think you’re so noble now?” She laughs, sharp and bitter.
“Your own mother helped me. Who do you think put my scarf on your dresser that day? I didn’t even have to try.
She even went back that evening to make sure you’d taken the bait.
Forgot her gloves, did she? Esther wanted her out as much as I did.
She walked it straight into your bedroom so the little-” She catches herself.
“-so Elizabeth would find it and finally leave.”
The table goes deathly still.
Esther’s wine glass freezes halfway to her lips.
Jarec turns his head toward his mother with terrifying slowness.
“Is that true?”
Esther lifts her chin. Cold. Imperious. Completely unrepentant.
“She was never right for this family. Victoria understands our world. That girl was a debt to a dying man, nothing more. I did what was necessary.”
Something in Jarec shifts.
I can see it happen - the moment when the man who spent his whole life deferring to his mother, shaped by her lessons and her coldness and her conviction that love was weakness, finally breaks free.
“Get out.”
Esther blinks. “Excuse me?”
“You heard me. Get out of this house. You are no longer welcome in my home, at my table, or in my life.” His voice is steady, but there’s steel beneath it that I’ve never heard before.
“Every door in this family that has ever opened for you closes tonight. If you contact my wife again - directly or through anyone else - you will never see me again.”
Esther’s face drains of color. “I am your mother.”
“No.” Jarec’s voice is flat. “You were. Now you’re just the woman who tried to destroy the only good thing I’ve ever had.”
He turns to Victoria.
“And you. You fabricated a hospital emergency. You tried to kiss me. I pushed you away and told you I was married. I told you to leave me alone. And still you worked with my mother to plant evidence and feed my wife lies and photographs from years ago. Listen carefully: you are finished in every circle that matters. Every door this family ever opened for yours is closed. If you come near Elizabeth again, if you speak her name, I will make certain no one in our world ever receives you again.”
He gestures toward the doorway, where two members of the household staff have appeared.
“Get out. Both of you. Now.”
Victoria looks like she might spit more venom, but the expression on Jarec’s face finally silences her. She and Esther are escorted from the room - Esther moving with rigid dignity, Victoria with barely controlled fury - and the front door closes behind them with a sound like a book snapping shut.
***
The remaining guests sit frozen, unsure what to do with the social catastrophe unfolding before them.
Jarec ignores them entirely. He turns to me, and the ice in his expression melts away. What remains is raw, exhausted, and completely unguarded.
“I don’t expect you to forgive me tonight,” he says, quieter now, meant only for me. “I left you alone in that house. I let you believe you were temporary. I let my fear of how much I already felt for you turn me into a ghost. That is on me. Not her. Not my mother. Me.”
He swallows hard.
“I never touched her. I never wanted her. Not once after I met you. The photographs were old, from years ago - before the contract, before you. I didn’t know about the scarf.
I’ve been punishing both of us ever since because I didn’t know how to want you the way I do without feeling like I was failing at everything I thought I knew about protecting myself. ”
His voice drops to almost a whisper.
“You were never a placeholder. You were never convenient. You were the first thing that ever felt real. And I was a coward about it.”
I stand frozen in my champagne-gold dress, every eye in the room on me. The armor I’ve built over the past two months is still there - I won’t let it fall just because he’s finally saying what I needed to hear months ago.
But something underneath it has shifted.
I believe him about Victoria. The confusion on his face when I mentioned the photographs was too genuine to fake. And the way he just exiled his own mother, in front of his entire social circle, for what she did to me-
That’s not the action of a man who doesn’t care.
But caring isn’t the same as choosing me. And pretty words in a crisis aren’t the same as the daily work of building something real.
My voice comes out steady, quiet, and cuttingly honest.
“I believe you didn’t sleep with her. I believe she lied. I believe you pushed her away that night.”
A beat.
“But you still let me think I was nothing for months. You still chose silence over me. You still left me alone with my pain and her poison. Truth doesn’t erase that, Jarec.”
I draw a slow breath.
“I’m taking the last of my things. I’m going back to the coast tonight. If you want to earn anything-” I meet his eyes. “You know where I’ll be. But I won’t wait forever. And I won’t beg.”
I turn and walk out of the dining room without looking back.
Jarec doesn’t stop me. He simply stands there, fists clenched at his sides, and watches the only woman he has ever wanted walk away from him in front of his entire world.
But this time, as I climb the stairs to collect my mother’s pearls, I know something I didn’t know before.
The photographs were lies.
The scarf was a trap.
And Jarec Fairweather just burned his relationship with his mother to the ground in front of everyone who matters in their world.
That’s not nothing.
It’s just not enough. Not yet.