Few monts Ago,
One month.
That was how long it had been since Jenny had done anything useful with her life, and she was acutely, miserably aware of it.
She sat on the edge of her bed — not quite lying down, not quite upright, occupying the uncomfortable middle space of a person who couldn’t commit to resting because her thoughts were too loud to allow it.
Her knees were pulled loosely to her chest, her back curved against the headboard, her fingernail pressed between her front teeth.
She bit down.
Pulled.
Bit again.
The room around her was large by most standards. The house — her mother’s house, her house, the house that had belonged to their family for long enough that the walls had absorbed the particular sll of it, wood and faint floral and sothing underneath both that was simply ’ho’ — sat at the end of a quiet lane behind iron gates and overgrown hedges.
It was not a mansion. She had always known it was not a mansion. But it was substantial.
Three floors of pale stone, wide windows, a garden that looked better in photographs than in person. The kind of house that suggested money without quite proving it.
Right now, all it proved was that she was trapped inside it.
Her bedroom window faced the front drive. She hadn’t planned on looking. She had, in fact, been making a precise and deliberate effort ’not’ to look for the better part of twenty minutes.
But she looked.
And there he was.
Jake.
He was standing beside his car — not even parked properly, half-mounted on the grass verge at the side of the drive like a man who had never learned to commit to a decision fully — with his hands in his jacket pockets and his eyes fixed upward on her window. When he caught the movent of her shifting curtain, his face broke open into the kind of hopeful, lopsided smile that had once been — she supposed — charming.
It wasn’t charming now.
Now it was just a reminder.
His father was dead. The hospital was in receivership. The wealth — the considerable, comfortable, embarrassingly reassuring wealth that had been the entire reason Jenny had allowed herself to be interested in Jake Harlowe in the first place — had evaporated with the speed and completeness of morning frost under direct sunlight. Gone. Swallowed by debt and bad investnts and the particular misfortune of a man who had spent decades accumulating enemies and not enough allies.
Dead and broke.
The combination was so thoroughly useless that Jenny could hardly believe she had sat across from his son at three dinner tables and called it a future.
She pulled the curtain closed.
Her phone buzzed on the mattress beside her. She glanced at it. Jake’s na. She let it ring until the screen went dark, then placed it face-down with the quiet, absolute finality of a judge setting down a gavel.
Her nail found her teeth again.
’Damn you,’ she thought. The words didn’t quite have a target — or rather, they had too many. Damn Jake for being poor now. Damn his father for dying at an inconvenient ti. Damn this house for feeling smaller every day. Damn the universe for arranging things the way it had, for stacking the sequence of events in precisely the order designed to leave Jenny on the outside of sothing she should have been inside.
But most of all —
’Damn you, Jake Harlowe, for being a complete and utter idiot.’
She pressed her knuckle against her mouth, eyes narrowing at nothing.
A month ago — slightly more than a month, now, if she was counting carefully and she was, she was always counting carefully — Jake had orchestrated sothing. He had arranged it with his particular brand of thoughtless cleverness, the kind that looked like planning but was really just recklessness wearing a collared shirt. He had arranged for Thalia to be drugged. For Thalia, her perfect, composed, always-three-steps-ahead step-sister, to be placed in a compromising situation with a man of significance.
The higher of the Black family.
’Cruxius.’
Jenny’s stomach dropped slightly, the way it always did when the na surfaced in her thoughts. It arrived with a physical sensation — a low, involuntary thud sowhere behind her ribs that she had never experienced around Jake, not once, not in three dinner tables and two years of half-hearted courtship.
She had t Cruxius only briefly. Once. In circumstances she hadn’t fully understood at the ti. He had intervened — she couldn’t explain it any other way — had stepped between her and sothing that could have gone badly, and had done it with the particular effortlessness of a man who didn’t consider the action especially noteworthy.
She thought about it more than was reasonable.
She thought about the line of his jaw. The way his eyes moved over a room. The unhurried quality of him, the sense that here was a person who had decided a long ti ago that urgency was for people with less certainty about outcos.
’Thump.’
There it was again. Just from thinking about him.
And Jake — ’Jake’ — had taken that man. Had reached into the universe’s arrangent and pulled out what should, by any reasonable asure, have been ’Jenny’s’ opportunity, and had handed it to Thalia instead.
Had drugged the wrong sister. Had aid the whole elaborate, stupid plan at precisely the wrong person.
"If I had known," Jenny murmured to her empty room, her voice low and bitten with feeling, "I would have—"
She stopped herself.
She pressed her lips together.
She looked at the ceiling.
’I would have spread my own legs for him without a second thought,’ finished the thought she hadn’t said aloud, because saying it aloud, even alone in her room, felt like admitting sothing about herself that she wasn’t quite prepared to have confird.
But it was true.
It was infuriatingly, humiliatingly true.
And because it was true, the image of Thalia — composed, diplomatic Thalia, sitting beside the Black family patriarch on every television screen in the country, being declared daughter-in-law and heir and owner of everything, ’everything’ — made sothing in Jenny’s chest contract with a feeling that lived several floors below pride and several floors above despair.
She turned her face toward the window again.
Jake was still there.
She watched him pace two steps left, two steps right, hands deep in his pockets, jaw working through so silent rehearsal of whatever he planned to say. He had been doing this for a week. Showing up. Parking on the grass verge. Waving. Calling. Texting. Standing outside the gate in the rain last Thursday until her mother’s light went on downstairs.
A week of it.
She breathed out through her nose, long and deliberate.
"That bastard," she said quietly, without particular heat. It was more exhaustion than anger at this point. The anger had burned hot for about two days and then settled into sothing lower and more sustainable — a steady, grey frustration, like a pilot light that never quite went out.
The sound of the front door opening reached her.
Jenny straightened fractionally, her attention sharpening. She heard the particular cadence of her mother’s footsteps on the stone path — quick, purposeful, the walk of a woman who had made up her mind before her feet left the house.
She shifted to the window.
Below, her mother had crossed the drive with impressive speed and was already positioning herself between Jake and the front entrance with the body language of soone who had been looking forward to this conversation.
Jake’s face arranged itself into an expression of cautious, hopeful appeal. He lifted one hand in a small wave.
"Aunty—"
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