Chapter Text
The sun was shining, and the world was ending.
That was how it felt, anyway. The fingers that held the pen trembled, making a mockery of her usually neat signature.
Elain Nolan.
At least, until the paperwork was filed with the court and a judge agreed. There had been a box her lawyer had dutifully checked, returning her back to Elain Archeron. It was as if the last ten years hadn’t happened.
Across from her, Graysen had already signed. He’d wanted to watch, to ensure she actually signed it. Elain had trekked across the city to his fancy lawyers office without her own (she’d been too ashamed to call her older sister and ask her to help), and sign away the life she’d once loved. Everything worked out in his favor thanks to her own desperation.
She thought if she’d been accommodating and forgiving, Graysen would realize he was making a mistake and take it all back. Instead, he’d gotten the house, half the equity in her business, half her meager retirement, and offered up nothing in return. No support, none of the finances other than an even split of their bank account, and the hatred burning in his steely gaze.
His lawyer snatched away the paperwork breathlessly. “Well,” he said, tucking it beneath the arm of his expensive suit. He glanced at Graysen before offering Elain a thin lipped, oily smile. “I believe that concludes our business. I can show you to the elevator—”
“Tell Feyre if she needs that help we talked about, I’m still good for my word,” Graysen added quickly. Elain couldn’t recall what he meant.
She was going to cry. She could feel the tears burning in her throat. There wasn’t a shred of dignity left to her and hadn’t been since he’d asked her. Was there someone else? Why didn’t he love her anymore? How did someone wake up one morning and just stop loving their wife? Graysen had never explained it satisfactorily to her and he likely never would.
“And me?” she heard herself whisper.
His expression hardened again. “Not you. Never you.”
He swept out of the room when it was clear she wasn’t going to, leaving her standing there with shaking legs and unkempt hair. His lawyer offered her a sympathetic smile, eyes pinched at the corners. “Why don’t we let him leave before ah…”
Elain collapsed into the black, leather swivel chair at the long conference table, hiding her face in her arms. She was a grown woman, she reminded herself. Sobbing like this was shameful, embarrassing. Where was her pride? Her dignity?
Gone, along with her wedding ring, her future plans, and the only man she’d ever loved. No one asked her to leave, despite her heaving, hiccuping sobs that must have carried through the thin, glass walls of the conference room. And no one said a damn thing to her when she finally stumbled out into the clinical hall that smelled strongly of pine sol and coffee.
Outside, the world looked exactly as it had when she’d walked in. How? Everything felt so different for her—wrong, ruined, upended. Shouldn’t the world reflect that? Standing in the humidity, Elain waited for storm clouds to roll across that cerulean sky, for thunder to rip through the serene peace of an otherwise perfect day.
Nothing happened.
She managed to make it to her car, though Elain felt a little drunk as she walked. Dazed, too. Tossing her keys to the passenger seat of her new-to-her Toyota Corolla—made in the late nineties, but still functional and more importantly, still affordable—Elain didn’t bother to turn the ignition despite the oppressive humidity.
Instead, she fished out her phone, the screen cracked from a fit of rage that saw her throwing it across the room. She’d been looking at houses on Zillow despite having almost no money to buy one. Her credit score wasn’t exactly great, either. Still, there had been a little farm house outside the city, sitting on three acres of uncut grass, that she hadn’t been able to stop fantasizing about. It was cheap because it needed to be gutted or had structural damage or something, but Elain didn’t care. In her mind, she saw herself doing all that work despite not knowing how.
Elain swiped through the pictures again, imagining painted walls, hanging plants, and maybe a couple chickens penned up on the property. It had character. Charm, even. More than she had. Maybe she liked the house so much because they were both hollowed out and empty.
Or maybe this was part of the grieving stage those women in the facebook chatrooms were always talking about. Anger, sadness, bargaining…and impulsive home ownership.
Or maybe not—Elain wasn’t a therapist, afterall. She was a florist with a business that was close to being upside down thanks to Graysen. She probably needed to see a therapist, but Elain hadn’t even admitted to her family that she was divorcing. Only her best friend, and only because Arina was nosy as hell…and was impossibly busy as a curator for some beautiful museum in the very metropolitan city of Velaris. The same city Elain currently was baking in.
Arina had wanted to throw her a party after the divorce, an idea so miserable Elain had broken down crying when Arina had suggested, which had been embarrassing given they were sitting in a Chili’s at the time.
What if I bought a house?
Elain sent the text before she fully comprehended the action. Her fingers still shook, her throat was still raw, her skin too tight. The phone chimed immediately.
Do it.
Of course, it wasn’t that simple. Elain had to go from pre-approval to full approval, which took her an entire month to complete given all her free time was spent laying in bed trying to think of something to text Graysen.
Not that he responded, of course. He’d blocked her, given the once blue bubbles of their text chat were now green, which made texting feel a little safer. Still, she had dreams where he came back to her on bended knee, apologizing for how horribly he’d treated her. She’d see him sweep her up in his arms and kiss her passionately only to be jerked back to the cruel reality in which he didn’t speak to her.
Sometimes, when she wanted to torment herself, she replayed his final words back in her mind.
Not you. Never you.
Had he done that favor for Feyre yet? Unlikely—he’d have told her little sister they’d divorced, surely, and Feyre would tell Nesta, and the two would descend on her shitty, studio apartment like a plague of locusts. They could handle bad break ups. Elain had watched them do it again and again. Hell, Feyre had ended a relationship with the man she intended to marry the day of their wedding, and go on with her life like everything would be fine.
They had the dignity Elain lacked.
She couldn’t handle their boss babe platitudes and insistence that men weren’t shit, anyway. If that were true, why were they dating a pair of brothers? Not that Elain would ever dare say that. She knew it made Feyre and Nesta feel better to imagine her put together and perfect rather than the reality.
She slept on a futon in the living room of her apartment, ignoring the peeling paint on the walls and the unpacked boxes scattered along the floor. If Elain wasn’t working, she was staring at her phone and scrolling mindlessly through short videos of other people living their lives. She liked to watch people put make up knowing damn well she was never going to dot freckles over the bridge of her nose or buy a sparkly primer that made it seem as if she were lit from within.
Word came back forty five days after she’d first applied. The bank was unhappy, of course, but Elain had used her trust to put down an enormous down payment which silenced any further objections. If she defaulted, they still had a sizable sum to soften the blow.
All that was left was to move. It should have been so easy–she was living out of a black trash bag stuffed with some clothes and a couple errant, mismatched bottles of shampoo and conditioner. Everything else was untouched, likely still reeking of her own life. And yet, when it came time to order a moving truck to take her out of Velaris, Elain always hesitated. Leaving made everything final in a way the divorce hadn’t. That seemed like a dream, something she’d imagined entirely and could escape if she just waited it all out.
Graysen had already moved on. She watched his life through his Instagram stories—Vegas and Cancun, boy's trips and parties where women in tiny bikinis always seemed to make an appearance. The women seemed too young, but Graysen had money which she supposed made a thirty something attractive to a nineteen year old.
He’d moved on. Shouldn’t she?
Not you. Never you.
Like she’d done something horrific to him. In one shouted fight, he’d admitted they’d married too young, but he’d proposed while they were still in college, and she’d been the one to drop out while he went to law school. Elain didn’t think she’d pressured him to do any of that—and it wasn’t like she’d gotten in the way of his goals or dreams. She’d worked odd jobs while he was in law school to pay their bills while also working to get her business off the ground. She’d managed their house, kept him fed, helped him study.
And he resented her for it.
It wasn’t fair. The idea that Elain could give up a decade of her life to a man who would turn around and blame her for every perceived fault and failure seemed too cruel to contemplate. Graysen wanted to live out his twenties, and some stupid, pathetic part of her wanted to wait until he got it out of his system. He’d come back—she knew he would. It wasn’t like he could cook, and Graysen hadn’t cleaned his own laundry since she’d moved in with him when she’d been nineteen.
What if it took another decade? What if he never came back? Elain decided to leave, thinking that he wouldn’t want her if she was moping and sad. Just like him, she needed to prove she could do things without him, if only to show him he wanted her back. Maybe, once she fixed up the house, he’d come back and they could start that family they’d always dreamed of.
Elain left, telling herself she’d be back.
She’d be back.
—
“Mom, please,” Lucien pleaded, turning to face his kitchen sink. “What the fuck.”
“Don’t swear,” his mother chided, talking to him as if he were a child.
“Dad says fuck all the time,” Rowan told his grandmother cheerfully, taking his place at the little table in the kitchen. His mother glanced over at her grandson, hardly old enough to have a grandson truly. His mother had her first child at sixteen, and six more in quick succession while his father had been in his thirties.
Or,
not
his father, as Lucien was learning. “Did dad—Beron—know?”
“Yes,” she replied, tucking a piece of auburn hair behind her ear. It was the same shade as Rowans, though his was a mop of wild curls inherited from the mother he didn’t remember.
“And he was fine with it?” Lucien demanded, turning his thoughts back to the problem at hand.
His mother leveled a look at him—the one that reminded Lucien of the chaotic, violent upbringing they’d all had. Had it gotten worse when he’d been born? Was that the excuse his father had needed? Or had he always been like that? Eris seemed to think he’d always been that way given the eulogy his brother had recently given.
Multiple people had called it disrespectful, but Lucien and his surviving brothers had all had a good laugh. Why memorialize a truly cruel man? No one had good memories of him, his family included. Funerals were hardly the time to lie.
Now, his father cold and bloated in the ground, Lucien was learning he’d never been Beron’s son at all but instead had some other, unnamed father. Maybe he should have guessed that—his late wife Jess had always quietly wondered where his dark skin came from. Now he supposed he knew.
“Why are you telling me this now?”
“Because we’re going on a date this weekend,” his mother informed him blithely. “And if he comes around for the holidays, I don’t want any surprises.”
Lucien swore under his breath again. “Am I going to meet him?”
“If you want,” she agreed, raking her fingers through Rowan’s hair in an attempt to smooth them into something a little more respectable. Good luck, he wanted to say, though Lucien preferred them unruly. His mothers had always been the same.
“I—I need to think about it,” Lucien admitted, before adding, “do my brothers know?”
“Yes.”
“And no one thought to mention it?” Lucien snapped, tempering his anger. His mother’s brown eyes flashed a warning, and though he was a grown man twice her size, Lucien shrank back a little, unwilling to make his mother angry.
“What would have been the point? Not knowing kept the worst of Beron’s anger focused on me, not you.”
Lucien was immediately overwhelmed with guilt. “Alright. Just…just let me know how the date goes and if you need me to put him in his place,” Lucien offered contritely. His mother exhaled, stepped forward, and pressed a kiss to his cheek.
“You’re a good man,” she told him before joining Lucien’s son at the dining table. It was early afternoon, just past lunch and Rowan was back inside with scraped knees, a hole in his brand new shorts, and dirt smudging the tip of his nose.
“Dad, someone bought the haunted house.”
Lucien, distracted, merely glanced down at his seven year old son. “Oh?”
“Yeah, some lady. I saw her moving things in this morning.”
“Oh, honey,” his mother murmured, licking her finger to wipe away the dirt. Rowan wiggled out of her grasp, cheeks squished beneath her grasp. “No one can live in that house.”
“I saw her,” Rowan protested, nearly knocking his chair backward to escape. “Her name is Elain.”
Lucien’s attention focused wholly on his son. “How do you know that?”
“She told me.”
“Why did she tell you her name?” Lucien pressed, though he already knew the answer. His son had likely marched right up to her to offer a welcome, the nosy little thing. Rowan was charming and unafraid of strangers no matter how many times Lucien had tried to drill it into his head that not everyone could be trusted. His mother had been the same way—fearless, adventurous, and entirely friendly to a fault.
A pang of grief pricked at his gut. Jess had been gone for six years, and Lucien’s misery had softened into fondness, his memories rosy. They’d been married two years, together for five before she’d passed away, leaving him with a son that bore a striking resemblance to her. Rowan had all of Lucien’s coloring—his golden brown skin, his russet colored eyes, his auburn hair—but the arrangement of those features were wholly Jesminda. It was her high cheekbones, her soft mouth, her wild curls that people noticed.
And her personality. She was still alive in that way, still loved by Lucien even if he couldn’t tell her so directly. He just wished that Rowan had a little of Lucien’s skepticism.
“I told her my name,” Rowan replied, interrupting Lucien’s internal monologue.
“What if she was a murderer?” Lucien demanded, just as he always did. “What if she kidnaps children.”
“She looked nice,” Rowan replied with a shrug of his shoulders, turning back to his glass of water. “She said when she got the pool fixed, I could swim in it.”
“I’ll bet she did,” Lucien muttered. Vowing he’d deal with the problem of a new neighbor later, he returned to work. He’d been out here alone for the last seven years—that old, rotting farm house had been for sale and abandoned far longer than Lucien had lived here. He imagined some developer had purchased it for pennies, would flip it, and turn it into an Airbnb.
Still, the thought of the neighbor interrupted his thoughts for the remainder of the day, punctuated only by Rowan wandering in and out to tell him about a leaf he saw or a bug he was trying to find—typically when Lucien was in the middle of a client meeting. He was fortunate to work as an attorney mostly from home given he rarely needed to be in court. Lucien was far better at litigating settlements and driving into Velaris as needed to get paperwork signed, but he mostly worked out of his office in the little cottage he and Jess had purchased years ago.
It would have been too small for them if they’d ever had the big family they’d wanted. Two bedrooms, one bathroom, and interconnecting rooms that offered little privacy, it had been all they could afford at twenty three. They’d always planned to move someday, but after she’d gotten sick and died, Lucien couldn’t bring himself to leave. All her memories were concentrated in that space.
And he’d vowed back then he’d never fall in love again, so what did it matter? Rowan got to grow up surrounded by the memories of his mother and out in nature, and Lucien remained close to the only woman he’d ever loved.
His mother and brothers helped—they watched Rowan when Lucien asked, providing free childcare so he could continue to work. It was what had brought her over that morning, though she’d stayed longer than she normally did to drop that little confession on him.
Another father. He’d dreamed of it as a child—some stranger coming to whisk him away, freeing him of Beron’s tyranny. Now he had it, and Lucien wasn’t sure he even wanted it. Where had he been, all those years? Content to watch from the sidelines, biding his time while hoping Beron would die young? He could have gone through the courts, could have provided a safe haven.
Could have condemned Lucien’s mother to an even worse fate than she already had. Lucien supposed it was a no win situation. Beron demanded absolute control and authority—he wouldn’t have given up Lucien anymore than he’d have let Lucien’s mom divorce him. She’d tried plenty of times to get away from him, and every single time, Beron found them and dragged him straight back. There was no point in being angry with anyone but Beron. Lucien could sort out the rest of his feelings in time.
He called it quits around four, making his way back into the living room where Rowan was, kneeling on a multicolored rug as he built another lego set. “C’mon,” he said, “let's go introduce dad to the neighbor.”
“You’ll like her,” Rowan began, scrambling to his feet so quickly he was in danger of destroying his progress. Lucien threw his hands out, but Rowan wasn’t concerned, barely glancing backward before bounding out of the house.
“How do you know I’ll like her?” Lucien questioned, offering his hand to his son as they stepped out into the humidity. He was ready for Summer to end even though it was only July. The weather wouldn’t become bearable until late September, a fact that made Lucien’s insides recoil. Rowan didn’t seem to care either way, pushing curls out of his warm, brown eyes as he bounded ahead barefoot.
“She’s nice,” Rowan declared, as if that were the only quality that mattered.
“Well, I hope she’d be nice to a little boy,” Lucien commented, earning a wrinkled nose frown from his son. It was
“Big boy, dad,” Rowan reminded him.
“Of course. My apologies,” Lucien replied, wishing Rowan didn’t feel so ready to grow up. Time seemed to be moving too quickly, and his little second grader was close to entering the third grade.
The youngest child in the class by far, but back when Lucien had enrolled him, he’d rationalized, he’d been motivated by the idea of socialization. Rowan didn’t talk to anyone his own age, and had been a shy little boy that only came out of his shell when he started interacting with peers his own age.
The house came into view about half a mile down the road. White peeling paint and broken windows and a broken fence made it a wildly unappealing property. Lucien was pretty confident there was a bat infestation in the attic, and the inside likely needed to be completely gutted. He didn’t expect to see anyone, still certain it had been purchased by an investor.
But no, there she was. Standing on the rotting front porch was a woman who couldn’t have been a whole lot younger than him, hands on her hips as she stared upward. The veranda was sagging and one of the support beams had splintered, likely from a bad storm. Elain, his son had said. That sounded like the name of someone corporate, but this woman had on short overalls and a pink tank top beneath, a peak of her slim stomach between the gaps of fabric.
She turned, hair braided in twin tails down her back, to look at him and oh. Lucien felt as if the wind had been sucked right out of him. She was easily the most beautiful woman he’d ever seen, which immediately made him feel guilty. He’d once said the same to Jess, and had believed it ardently.
“Oh, hey, Spam!” she said with a smile, walking down the creaking steps to greet his son.
“I brought you help, just like I promised!” Rowan told her, bounding toward her to throw his arms around her middle. He barely knew her—why was he greeting her like an old friend?
“Lucien Vanserra, and my son, Rowan Vanserra,” he told her, taking her smooth, small hand in his own. She offered him a smile that didn’t quite meet her eyes—she looked as if she’d been crying. Or, maybe it was allergies? Her eyes were just a little swollen and red, and the warm, soft brown were glassy and just a little unfocused. Had she realized what a monumental mistake she’d made?
“It’s nice to meet you. I’m Elain Nol—Elain Archeron. I uh…I didn’t realize how much work this place was going to need.”
Lucien rubbed the back of his neck. “Yeah, it’s been empty for a long time. Local kids used to party in it before they put locks on the door.”
“That explains all the beer cans,” she replied. “I don’t expect you to help, by the way. I’ll hire contract—”
“What kind of neighbor would I be if I didn’t?” he heard himself interrupt. Why? Shut up. Was this who he was? The first beautiful woman he stumbled upon made him forget everything in the hopes of spending some time with her? No, he was just being friendly. It would inevitably amount to nothing.
Besides, it wasn’t as if he’d been living like a monk. He’d had plenty of one night stands when his son was at his moms or out with one of his brothers. Not that he intended to sleep with this woman, he amended hastily in his mind. Just that it wasn’t the first time he’d had those kinds of thoughts, and he didn’t need to beat himself up so badly about them.
She offered him a small, shy smile that made his stomach twist into knots. Between them, Rowan’s head pinged back and forth with unconcealed delight.
“Can I use the hammer?”
“Of course you can,” Elain offered sweetly, unaware that a hammer was the last thing he’d let his son help with.
“No,” Lucien added, shaking his head. Elain’s cheeks flushed.
“Oops,” she whispered, offering Rowan a conspiratorial wink. “Well, how about paint?”
“Dad let me help paint my bedroom!” Rowan informed her without telling her how he’d knocked a bucket over on the hardwood floor. She’d figure it out eventually.
Elain smiled. “I can’t wait.”