Owned by my step uncles

Chapter five

I didn’t wait for Reeve to come back.

The second the static filled the open line and his face changed, I turned and walked as fast as I could, past the kitchen, past the wide windows that looked out over empty lawns. Up the main stairs two at a time while my pulse still hammered from the way his eyes had moved over me. The house felt too full of them. Jarrah somewhere outside the walls with a camera already dead, Reeve’s hunger still sitting under my skin like a brand. I needed space that didn’t smell like their soap and their silence.

Mother’s wing was the farthest I could get without leaving the house.

The hallway leading to it was quiet and narrow ,than the rest of the estate. The light came in softer through the tall windows, filtered by the sheer curtains she always left half-drawn. Her scent still lingered faintly in the air, something expensive and clean that had never quite belonged to this place. I pushed open the double doors to her suite and let them close behind me with a soft click.

The rooms were exactly as she’d left them.

Bed made with military precision. Closet half-empty from the packing. A silk robe still hanging on the back of the bathroom door. The ocean crashed against the rocks below the windows, steady and indifferent. I stood in the center of the sitting room and tried to breathe past the tightness in my chest.

They were both still out there. Jarrah on the perimeter. Reeve somewhere downstairs with the tablet and that look in his eyes he no longer bothered to hide. The heavy atmosphere followed me even here. It lived in the way my skin remembered the weight of Jarrah’s stare at breakfast and the slow path Reeve’s gaze had taken across my body. Forbidden. Too close. Getting closer every hour they were the only ones left in this house with me.

I needed something to do with my hands.

The walk-in closet still held the things she hadn’t taken. Sweaters folded on shelves. A row of dresses that had never been worn in Newport. Shoeboxes stacked neatly along the top ledge. I pulled the first one down without thinking and sat on the carpeted floor with it in my lap. Tissue paper. A pair of heels she’d worn once to some charity dinner.

Sorting felt better than sitting still. Better than listening for footsteps in the hall or the sound of the front door opening. Better than wondering whether Jarrah was still walking the east wall alone while a camera stayed dark.

The third box was heavier.

I lifted the lid and found scarves, Silk and Cashmere. The pale blue one she’d folded so carefully the morning she left. Underneath them was a smaller box, unmarked, the kind that used to hold stationery. I almost put it back. Something about the way it sat at the bottom felt deliberate and hidden.

I opened it anyway.

Old photographs, not the posed family ones that lived in silver frames downstairs. These were smaller, older with soft edges. The first few were of my mother in her twenties, laughing on a beach I didn’t recognize, hair windblown, face softer than the polished version I knew. Then one of her with a man whose back was turned and another.

My breathe seized.

The man wasn’t a stranger.

Dorian stood beside her in a photograph that had to be fifteen years old at least, looking young with dark hair with almost no silver. His hand rested low on her waist in a way that wasn’t polite or new. They were standing in front of a building I didn’t know, city lights behind them, and the look on my mother’s face was nothing like the careful smile she wore now. It was open, Familiar, Like she’d already known him for a long time.

The official story had always been simple. They’d met four years ago at a fundraiser in Boston. They had a short courtship, quiet wedding and I was brought into the Newport house as the new stepdaughter of a man who’d never known I existed before but this picture said otherwise.

My fingers tightened on the edges of the photo. The paper was slightly warped, as if it had been taken out and put back many times. Underneath it were more, same man, same woman but in dfferent cities and different years. One was dated on the back in my mother’s handwriting: *Zurich, 2011*. Another: *the weekend everything changed*.

I sat there on the closet floor with my mother’s secrets spread across my lap and felt the house shift around me.

Everything about the marriage had been planned long before I ever set foot in this place. Before the careful introductions. Before the polite distance the Thorne brothers had kept for years. Before the cars on the access road and the doors closing in empty wings.

A soft sound came from the hallway outside the suite.

I froze when I heard footsteps, Slow, Measured and not the quick pace Reeve had used when the second alert came in. These were heavier. Familiar in a way that made the heat under my skin return even while fear crawled up my spine.

Jarrah Or someone who wanted me to think it was him.

I shoved the photographs back into the box with shaking hands and pushed it under the lowest shelf. My pulse slammed against my throat. The footsteps stopped just outside the double doors with a soft knock.

Then Jarrah’s voice was low and rough from the cold.

“Kirrily. Open the door.”

I stood up, My legs felt unsteady. The closet suddenly seemed too small and the air too thin. I could still feel the shape of that old photograph against my palms, my mother and Dorian years before they were supposed to have met, smiling like the future had already been decided.

The knock came again but this time firmer.

“I know you’re in there.”

I reached for the door handle.

Behind me, on the carpet where the box had sat, a single photograph had slipped free and landed face-up. The one from Zurich and my mother's younger face. Dorian’s hand on her waist and in the bottom corner, almost cropped out, the partial edge of another figure, someone standing just behind them, watching.

Someone who looked a lot like a younger Jarrah.