SEVEN

JOLENE'S POV

Rebecca came home two days later, weaker but alive, and the first thing she did was study me from across the kitchen like she was trying to remember something she'd almost forgotten.

"You didn't poison me," she said finally, not quite a question.

"No," I answered carefully, bracing myself for whatever came next.

"I know," she said, and there was no warmth in it, just fact, delivered the way she delivered everything, like an audit. "I remember making that tea myself." Her eyes flicked toward the hallway, toward the direction of the west wing, and something passed over her face too quick for me to name. "I remember a lot of things people think I don't."

She didn't say anything else, just walked past me to her room, her steps slower than they used to be, but it was the first time since the wedding that Rebecca hadn't looked at me like something she wanted scraped off her shoe.

I didn't trust it. But I noticed it, the way you notice the first crack in ice you've been told is solid.

Victor moved into the guest house on the property that same week, claiming he needed to be close while he "settled Logan's affairs," though I overheard Jake tell Hailey it was really so their uncle could keep an eye on all of them, watching how the will was being honored, or dishonored, one day at a time.

I ran into him most mornings after that, always near the garden, always with two cups of coffee like he'd started expecting me before I even knew I'd be there.

"You don't have to do this," I told him one morning, taking the cup anyway because it smelled better than anything Rebecca let me drink in that kitchen.

"Do what," Victor asked, leaning against the stone railing, watching the sun climb over the hedges instead of me.

"Be kind to me. Everyone else in this house has a reason not to be."

Something flickered across his face, gone before I could name it. "Maybe I don't need a reason."

"Everyone in this family has a reason for everything," I said before I could stop myself, the bitterness slipping out before I could dress it up as anything softer.

He almost smiled at that, just the corner of his mouth. "Then maybe I'm not like the rest of this family."

I didn't know what to do with that, so I sipped the coffee instead and let the silence stretch, comfortable in a way silence rarely was in that house.

"My brother wrote to me, you know," he said after a moment, watching the garden instead of me, his voice lower now. "Before he died. Told me to watch out for someone in this house. Didn't give a name."

My chest tightened. "Did he say why?"

"No." Victor's grey eyes finally met mine, steady, unreadable. "But I have a feeling I've found her."

I didn't answer that. I couldn't. My throat had gone tight and my coffee had gone cold in my hands.

That evening, Jake found me in the hallway outside my room, his tie loose, his eyes tired in a way that made him look almost like the boy I used to know in the library, before all of this, before the will, before Maya.

"You've been spending time with my uncle," he said, and it wasn't quite an accusation, but it wasn't nothing either.

"He's been kind to me," I said simply. "Something new around here."

Jake's jaw flexed, the muscle jumping under his skin. "Be careful with him, Jo."

"Why?" I asked, tilting my head, something reckless rising in me that I hadn't felt since the wedding. "Jealous?"

The word left me before I could stop it, and for a second, something raw crossed his face before he shut it down completely, folding it away like he always did.

"No," he said, too fast. "I just know him."

"You know Maya too," I said quietly, "and look how that's going."

I hadn't meant to say it. But I didn't take it back either, and I watched it land, watched something in him flinch even as his face stayed still.

Jake stared at me for a long moment, something warring behind his eyes, something that looked a lot like the boy who used to sneak me dessert and a lot less like the man who planned to divorce me in a year and marry someone else in the same breath.

"Goodnight, Jolene," he said finally, voice rough, and walked away before I could see whatever it was he didn't want me to see.

I stood there long after his door clicked shut, my heart doing something complicated and unwanted, something I didn't have a name for yet.

Three hundred and thirty-six days left.

And for the first time since the wedding, I wasn't sure which man in that house scared me more, the one who still had feelings for me buried under all that ice, or the one who was slowly, quietly, learning how to make me feel wanted.