Chapter Nineteen
~ Jai ~
Grace had the sleeping schedule of someone who believed time was a suggestion rather than a rule, which meant my morning coffee was only half-finished and already going cold.
I had her settled against my hip, one hand braced under her tiny back and head, the cherry sucker tucked in my cheek sending sugar through my system at a rate my body no longer processed efficiently, and I was staring at the stone fireplace trying to decide whether it was worth the effort to start a fire when the wood was already damp from last night’s rain.
Then Ashe Wilson materialized in the doorway of the great room, and I knew before he opened his mouth that whatever was about to come out of it would improve my morning the way a brick to the face improves your complexion.
He wore the expression. The specific one. Flat eyes, tight jaw, the look of a man who had been handed a situation he had no interest in managing and was already drafting the hand-off memo in his head.
“Jai.” My name in his mouth came out the way everything did—stripped of decorative emphasis. “You have visitors at the front gate.”
I pulled the sucker from my cheek. “Define ‘visitors.’”
“Two of them. Claiming family connection. Driving a 2017 Lexus with Washington plates.”
The cherry flavor went sour in my mouth. I set the coffee down on the side table with a click that caught Grace’s attention. Her head turned slightly against my chest, those too-alert eyes opening a fraction before deciding the situation wasn’t worth full engagement.
I knew before the sentence landed. Of course I knew. The universe had a specific sense of humor, and it tended to deliver my parents on the exact morning after I’d been claimed, knotted, and nearly murdered, because why the hell not.
“Send them through,” I said. “But if they try to leave pamphlets, I’m going to set them on fire.”
Ashe’s expression didn’t change. “Braham is in the study.”
“Braham can wait five minutes. Family emergency. Of a kind.”
I handed Grace off to Ashe without waiting for permission. He took her with the same brisk efficiency he brought to everything, one arm supporting her back, his face doing the thing where he tried very hard not to look fond of her and failed by several degrees.
Grace made a soft sound of protest—the gurgle that meant she had opinions about the hand-off and was prepared to express them once she’d finished napping on the matter—and then settled against Ashe’s chest with the immediate certainty of a pup who had decided that this man, for all his frosty demeanor, was acceptable.
“Five minutes,” I said.
Ashe left through the kitchen door. I walked the other way, toward the front of the house, my ribs pulling with each step and the bite mark at my throat throbbing faintly under the collar of my shirt.
The great room hit as I entered. Timber beams overhead, massive and dark, the kind of wood that had been growing when my grandparents were still figuring out how to tie their shoes.
The stone fireplace sat cold and empty at the far wall, the grate clean, the hearth swept, nothing in it but the faint ghost of last night’s embers.
Amber morning light cut through the floor-to-ceiling windows in long shafts that reached the timber floor and pooled in warm rectangles.
The smell was cedar and wood smoke and aged scotch, layered into every surface the way a man’s scent works its way into a space when he’s been living in it long enough.
My parents stood in the middle of it looking aggressively, immaculately wrong.
Gladys was perched on the edge of one of the leather chairs like she’d been told it was recently upholstered in something venomous.
Her sensible low heels didn’t quite touch the floor.
Her hands were folded in her lap, knuckles white, her posture the starch stiffness of a woman who had spent decades being watched and found acceptable and was not about to relax now, in a stranger’s house, with her son’s torn jacket hanging off a hook by the door.
Gerald stood with his hands clasped behind his back, surveying the square footage with the focused appraisal of a man pricing real estate he disapproves of.
His light brown hair had gone mostly silver, cropped close and immaculate, and he was wearing the same pressed slacks and collared shirt he wore to church, to the grocery store, to the dinner table where he’d spent seven years telling me who I was allowed to be.
Grace, settled back on my hip after Ashe had handed her off in the kitchen threshold, fixed Gerald with a look. Flat. Unblinking. Her tiny face had gone still, her body rigid against my chest, and the silence she produced was somehow more unnerving than the crying.
I didn’t sit down. Didn’t offer coffee. I stood in the doorway with Grace’s weight against my sore ribs and the sucker still in my hand and waited for the opening act I could have performed from memory.
Gladys delivered first. Her voice came out warm and winning, the particular register she deployed when she was absolutely certain she was already winning.
“Jai, sweetheart. We’ve been so worried.
” Her hands unfolded from her lap, reaching without touching, the gesture of a woman who believed proximity was the same thing as connection.
“When we heard about the incident in Portland, the break-in, the police report, we couldn’t just sit at home.
Not when our boy was in trouble. Family is everything, Jai.
You know that. You’ve always known that. ”
Gerald backed her with the smooth, measured certainty of a man reading from a script he’d written himself.
“Blood calls to blood, son. Always has. Whatever’s happened, whatever situation you’ve found yourself in, the family stands ready.
That’s what we do. That’s who we are. The Flynns look after their own. ”
I had heard this script so many times I could have performed both parts in my sleep. Blood calls to blood. Family is everything. The phrasing that made obligation sound like love and love sound like something you earned by being smaller than you were.
I waited. Let them run through the preamble. Let the words land on the timber floor and sit there, gathering dust.
When the pause came—the natural break where a normal son would step in, reassure, perform the gratitude they’d driven six hours to collect—I said, “I’m not marrying Denise. Or anyone else you’ve found. That conversation is over.”
Gerald raised a hand. Almost gentle. The gesture of a reasonable man making a reasonable correction. “Of course not, son. Of course not. That was a misunderstanding. We’ve moved past that.”
The pivot came with the smooth efficiency of a man who had planned this turn before he walked through the door. I watched it happen in real time, the shift in his posture, the recalibration of his expression, the way his hands came together in front of him like he was holding something precious.
“Your situation has changed.” Gerald’s voice carried the warmth of a man offering something rather than asking for it.
“We understand that. Times change. People change. What matters is that you’re involved with a man of considerable standing.
Braham Wolfe. CEO of Wolfe Global Industries.
A name that carries weight in circles that matter to the family. ”
He said “family” the way he said everything—measured and warm, like the word itself was a favor he was doing me.
“Given the closeness of your relationship, surely you could put in a word. Open a door. Make an introduction. The connections he has, the resources, the influence, those are things that could benefit everyone. The family would be so grateful, Jai. So grateful.”
He said “grateful” with the emphasis of a man who had never been grateful for anything in his life and was not about to start now.
The whole thing landed in my chest with a cold, clarifying clarity.
After the deleted manuscripts. After the woman on the couch, Denise, or whoever they’d found that week, paraded through the living room with the brisk efficiency of parents auditioning a daughter-in-law.
After the breaking and entering into my apartment, the years of quiet relentless pressure to be someone else entirely.
They were here to use me as a business card.
I looked at my father’s careful, expectant face—the square jaw, the hazel eyes that were mine and weren’t, the immaculate posture of a man who confused control with dignity—and something went very still inside me.
Not anger. Not grief. Something quieter and more final, like a door closing in a room I’d been standing outside of for years.
“No,” I said. Flat. Final. No drama in it. Just the word, delivered the way you’d state a fact about the weather. “Get out.”
Gerald’s warmth evaporated instantly. The measured tone stayed—he was too disciplined to lose composure entirely—but what was underneath it hardened.
The lines around his mouth deepened. His hands came apart at his sides, fingers flexing once, and when he spoke again the warmth had been replaced by something colder and considerably less careful.
“Jai. Listen to yourself. You’re standing in a house that doesn’t belong to you, making demands of the people who raised you, who sheltered you, who gave you every opportunity—”
“I said no.”
“I know what you said.” His voice had dropped half a register, what happened when Gerald Flynn stopped negotiating and started executing.
“And I’m telling you that you don’t understand the position you’re in.
I know people, Jai. People with reach. People who can make life difficult for a man in your situation.
A man living with another man’s child, no legal claim, no paperwork, nothing but a relationship the state of Oregon does not recognize.
Do you understand how fragile that is? How easily it could be taken from you? ”