19. Jarec
— ? —
Jarec
The morning after the dinner, I wake in an empty house.
The silence is different now. Before, it pressed against me like an accusation - the weight of her absence, the echo of everything I’d done wrong. Now it feels more like a holding pattern. A space waiting to be filled.
You know where I’ll be.
She gave me that. Not forgiveness, not absolution, but a direction. A possibility. Something to move toward instead of just something to grieve.
I stand at my bedroom window and watch the sun rise over the water. The staff won’t arrive for another hour, and I’m grateful for the solitude. I need time to think. To plan. To figure out what earning actually looks like when you’ve spent your whole life taking things for granted.
My mother’s rooms have been cleared out overnight - I gave the order before I went to bed, and the staff executed it with quiet efficiency.
Her things have been packed and sent to the family estate, where she can sort through them or not.
I don’t care. Victoria’s name has been removed from every guest list, every invitation, every social register I control.
The machinery of exile is already grinding into motion, doors closing one by one.
None of it matters as much as the woman in the cottage by the sea.
Earn it, she said.
I pull out my notebook - the one where I’ve been cataloguing my failures, writing lists of what I did wrong and who I need to become. I turn to a fresh page and write at the top: How to prove I’ve changed.
The list that follows is harder than anything I’ve written before.
Because earning isn’t about grand gestures.
It’s not about showing up with expensive gifts or dramatic declarations.
Elizabeth has never wanted my money, never been impressed by the trappings of Fairweather wealth.
What she wanted - what she asked for, again and again, in ways I was too blind to see - was my time.
My presence. The simple act of being there.
Show up. Keep showing up. Let her set the pace.
I write it down. Read it back to myself. Let the words sink in.
This isn’t going to be easy. I’ve spent my whole life learning to protect myself by staying distant, by keeping people at arm’s length, by never wanting anything badly enough to be hurt when it’s taken away.
Everything I need to do now requires the opposite - vulnerability, patience, the willingness to be seen and possibly rejected.
But she’s worth it. She’s worth everything.
I close the notebook and begin to plan.
***
I start small.
The first delivery arrives at her cottage three days after the dinner: white roses, a simple arrangement, no card.
I remember her mentioning it once, in passing, during her first week in the house.
I was crossing the foyer while the staff arranged fresh flowers, and she said it half to herself, not knowing I’d stopped in the doorway to listen - her mother grew white roses in the small garden behind their house.
She used to help tend them as a child, learning which blooms to cut and which to leave, watching them open in the summer sun.
She said they reminded her of being safe.
I pretended I hadn’t heard. I kept walking, the way I always kept walking. But I was listening. I was always listening. I just never let her see it.
I don’t know if she’ll keep them. Don’t know if she’ll throw them in the trash the moment she sees them, or leave them on the porch to wilt, or bring them inside and set them on her kitchen table where she’ll have to look at them while she eats.
I send them anyway.
Every three days. The same white roses. The same silence.
I’m here. I’m waiting. I haven’t forgotten.
A week passes. Then two. I hear nothing from her - no acknowledgment, no rejection, nothing. The uncertainty should be unbearable, and in some ways it is. But I’ve decided to trust the process. To keep showing up even when I don’t know if it’s working.
This is what patience looks like. This is what earning looks like.
This is the man I’m learning to become.
***
I go back to her gallery.
This time I don’t disguise myself. I walk through the front door in daylight, dressed in clothes that clearly mark me as Jarec Fairweather, and I let people see me looking at her work.
The whispers start immediately.
The Fairweather heir, at his estranged wife’s art show.
Did you hear what happened at the family dinner?
They say he exiled his own mother. Can you imagine?
I ignore them. I’m not here for the gossip mill. I’m here because this is part of who she is - this extraordinary talent, this ability to translate pain into beauty, this whole world she built while I was too busy pushing her away to notice.
I need to understand it. Need to understand her.
Marguerite Begum watches me from across the room as I move through the exhibition.
She’s the silver-haired woman from the photograph in the magazine, the gallery owner who discovered Elizabeth and gave her this platform.
Her expression is unreadable - assessing, perhaps.
Deciding whether I’m worthy of the artist she’s championing.
I stop in front of a piece I haven’t seen before. A new addition to the show, replacing something that must have sold. This one is smaller than Arrangement, more intimate - a study in grays and silvers, the suggestion of a figure seen through rain-streaked glass. Waiting. Watching. Alone.
“She painted that one recently,” Marguerite says, appearing at my elbow. “After she came back from your house that night.”
I don’t ask how she knows who I am. It’s obvious, and pretending otherwise would be insulting.
“It’s beautiful,” I say instead.
“It’s sad.” Marguerite’s voice is matter-of-fact. “All her best work is sad. You have something to do with that, I expect.”
“Yes.”
“At least you’re honest about it.” She studies me with those sharp eyes, reading me the way she reads paintings - looking for what’s beneath the surface, the truth behind the technique. “She’s not here today. Won’t be back until next week.”
“I know. I’m not here to see her.”
“Then why are you here?”
I turn to face her. “Because she built something extraordinary, and I never took the time to see it. I’m trying to understand who she became while I was too busy being afraid to pay attention.”
Marguerite is silent for a long moment.
“That’s a better answer than I expected,” she says finally. “Most men in your position would be here to make a scene. To demand something. To try to fix it with money or influence.”
“She doesn’t want my money. She wants-” I stop. Consider how to phrase it. “She wants me to become someone worth wanting. I’m working on it.”
Another long pause.
“The painting of the figure in the rain,” Marguerite says. “It’s called Waiting. She told me it’s about learning to be patient with yourself. Learning to trust that clarity will come, even when everything is obscured.”
I look at the painting again. The figure behind the glass. The rain streaming down. The quality of stillness, of suspended time.
“Thank you,” I say.
Marguerite nods once and walks away, leaving me alone with Elizabeth’s art and the growing certainty that I’m on the right path.
I don’t buy anything today. I don’t need to. I just wanted her to know I was here, paying attention, finally seeing what I should have seen all along.
***
The roses keep arriving.
I don’t vary the arrangement. Don’t add cards or gifts or anything that might seem like pressure. Just white roses, every three days, delivered to her door with no explanation required.
I imagine her face when she sees them. I imagine her setting them in water, or throwing them away, or simply leaving them on the porch while she decides what to do.
I imagine her thinking of her mother, of the garden where she learned to tend growing things, of the life she had before I complicated everything.
I hope the roses remind her that someone is thinking of her. That someone is trying. That someone is learning, slowly and painfully, how to show up.
Two and a half weeks after the dinner, I drive to the cottage.
I don’t intend to knock. Don’t intend to impose myself on her space or demand anything she’s not ready to give. I just need to see where she is. Need to feel closer to her, even if she never knows I’m there.
The car rolls to a stop at the end of the lane, away from the house, visible but not intrusive.
The cottage glows warm against the darkening sky, lights in the windows, smoke rising from the chimney.
She’s home. She’s safe. She’s building a life in this small space by the sea, and I’m trying to find my way back to her.
I sit in the car and watch.
The rain starts an hour after I arrive - the same kind of rain that fell the night of the storm, the night I kissed her and then walked away. It hammers the roof, streams down the windows, turns the world into smears of light and shadow.
I remember her in my arms that night. The way she pressed against me when the power went out. The way she tasted when I finally gave in and kissed her.
And then I remember walking away. Leaving her alone in the dark. Convincing myself that distance was kindness, that protecting myself was the same as protecting her.
I was so wrong.
Two hours pass. The rain doesn’t let up. I’m soaked from the walk to and from the car - I got out once, just to stretch my legs, and the sky opened up as if it had been waiting for me.
The porch light flickers on.
I go still, water dripping from my hair, watching through the windshield.
Her silhouette appears in the doorway. She’s wrapped in something soft - a sweater, maybe, or a blanket. She looks out at the rain, at the lane, at the car she must recognize by now.
She doesn’t come out. Doesn’t wave me in. Doesn’t tell me to leave.
She just stands there, watching me watch her.
The moment stretches. Rain pours down. The world shrinks to the space between my car and her door, all the distance I need to close and all the patience it will take to close it.
After a long moment, she goes back inside.
The porch light stays on.
I sit in the darkness for another hour, cold and wet and somehow more hopeful than I’ve been in months. She saw me. She didn’t send me away. She left the light on.
It’s not forgiveness. It’s not even an invitation.
But it’s not a rejection either.
I drive home at midnight, soaked to the bone, heart fuller than it’s been since she left.
She didn’t send me away.
It’s a start. It’s enough. For now, it’s everything.