11: Aftermath

**JAPHETH POV**

I walked out of Jasmine's building lighter than I'd walked in, which was more than I'd let myself hope for that morning.

I told Edmund to head home once he dropped me off,  I wanted the walk up to my own floor to clear my head before I had to be anyone's boss or son or brother again for the rest of the night. I stripped off my jacket the second the door shut behind me, tossed my shirt over my shoulder, and made it halfway to the kitchen before my own front door swung open without so much as a knock.

"What if I'm walking around here naked?" I asked, not even bothering to sound surprised anymore. My family had never respected a locked door in their lives.

Mom's smile was already wide as she pulled me into a hug. "I've seen you naked, baby Japheth."

"When I was an infant, Mom. I'm a grown man now."

"You'll always be my baby," she said, patting my cheek like that settled the matter, which, with her, it always did.

Dad clapped my shoulder on his way past, and Kate trailed in last, still typing something on her phone, not even looking up.

"Why are you all here?" I asked, pulling my shirt back on before Mom could comment further on my chest.

"We wanted to hear how it went with Peaches," Dad said, settling onto my couch like he owned it, which, given he'd paid for half the building, he sort of did.

"Wow! When did you get a tattoo?" Mom's voice cut through before I could answer, and I felt my stomach drop.

Nobody was supposed to know about that except Peaches and Edmund. And now, apparently, my entire family, judging by the way Kate's head snapped up from her phone with a grin already spreading across her face.

"You have K's name tattooed on your back, baby Japheth," Kate said, delighted in a way that told me I wasn't getting out of this conversation any time soon.

"I was drunk. I barely remember getting it. Whatever you're imagining, Kate, don't."

"I don't have to imagine anything. It's literally right there."

"It looks good on you," Dad said, sounding genuinely pleased, like this was a business decision he approved of. "Didn't peg you for a tattoo guy, but it suits you."

"Can we talk about literally anything else," I said, dropping onto the armchair across from them.

"How did it go with Peaches?" Mom asked again, settling in beside Dad.

"She'll be okay. I apologized. Properly, this time." I left out most of the rest  the hand over mine, the quiet, the way it had felt like something had actually mended instead of just been patched over. Some things I wanted to keep for myself a little longer.

"That's it? We want details," Kate said, elbowing me the second she sat close enough.

"There are no details, Kate. We talked. I apologized. She accepted it. That's the whole thing."

"Boring," she said, but she was smiling like she didn't believe me, which was fair, because I wasn't being entirely honest.

"So, is she taking the position?" Dad asked, more serious now.

"She should hear about it from you directly, but yes. I told her she earned it and she should take it, and that whatever Voss decides to make of it is my problem to handle, not hers."

Dad studied me for a long moment, something like approval settling into his face. "Good man."

I didn't tell him how close I'd come to getting that exactly backward.

*****

**JASMINE POV

I was still sitting on my couch, replaying the whole evening  his hand under mine, the way he hadn't pushed for anything more than that  when my phone buzzed with a name that made my stomach drop before I even opened the message.

**DAD:** Heard from your mother you're getting a real position at Montgomery. Good. About time you started earning your keep properly.

I stared at it for a long moment before I typed back something neutral.

**JASMINE:** I earned it on my own merit.

**DAD:** Of course you did, sweetheart. Doesn't change what this family's owed the Montgomerys for twenty years. A position like that reflects on all of us. Don't embarrass this family by getting distracted from what matters.

I knew exactly what "distracted" meant in Richard's vocabulary. It meant Japheth. It meant anything that wasn't directly, measurably useful to the Rays' standing with the family that had funded my education, kept my mother insured, kept us housed in a neighborhood we couldn't have otherwise afforded.

**DAD:** I mean it, Jasmine. You have one job now  be indispensable to that family. Don't let a schoolgirl crush undo nine years of us building trust with them.

My hands were shaking again, the way they had in my office earlier that day, except this time it wasn't grief doing it. It was something colder and more familiar  the particular helplessness of being reminded, again, that even my own successes weren't fully mine. They were payments. Installments on a debt I'd never actually agreed to but had been born into anyway.

**JASMINE:** I'll do my best.

**DAD:** Do better than your best.

I set the phone face-down on the cushion beside me, the same spot where Japheth's hand had been not two hours earlier, and I sat there for a long time in the quiet, feeling the two halves of my life pull against each other  the part that had just been told, gently and honestly, that she deserved good things without earning them through fear, and the part that had spent nine years believing exactly the opposite.

I didn't know yet which version of me was going to win. I just knew I was tired of choosing.

Luke found me there an hour later, still staring at nothing, the phone screen long since gone dark in my lap.

"You okay?" he asked, sitting down carefully beside me.

"My dad texted."

"Ah." He didn't need more explanation than that. He'd heard enough about Richard over the years to fill in the rest himself. "What'd the old tyrant want this time?"

"The usual. Be grateful. Be useful. Don't embarrass the family."

Luke was quiet for a moment, uncharacteristically so. "You know that's not actually love, right? What he does?"

"I know," I said, and I even mostly believed it. "Knowing it doesn't make it stop working on me, though."

He put his arm around my shoulders, and I let myself lean into it, grateful, not for the first time, that somewhere along the way I'd built a family that had nothing to do with debt or obligation at all.

"You earned that promotion," Luke said quietly. "Nobody gets to make you feel small about it. Not your dad. Not Japheth. Not anyone."

I nodded against his shoulder, wishing it were as simple to believe as it was to hear.