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Greer
The day before Halloween crawled by. The fog refused to lift; Richmond House was socked in, the grayed-out view from every window making the house feel exactly like the decaying coffin it was. And I was trapped inside.
Wade had gone out again, likely searching for sustenance to get him through his flight back to Shreveport tonight. I didn’t want him to go. I was trying to distract myself, reading in my bedroom after lunch, when I heard the rumble of an engine. I watched out the window as a black blur whipped around the tracks toward the side of the house. It looked like Jace’s Range Rover.
Oh my God.
I caught a glimpse of myself in the full-length mirror propped in the corner. Joggers. Nirvana T-shirt. Thick fluffy socks.
Great.
I hurriedly toed off the socks and traded my joggers for jeans before sawing my toothbrush around my mouth for a few seconds. I spat in the bowl and rinsed with the fresh pitcher of water I’d poured that morning. I’d brushed before, but I wanted to make sure my breath was fresh in case…in case what? In case Jace was here to tell me he wanted me back? But even if he did…it changed nothing.
My shoulders sagged, and the frantic energy that had propelled me around the room slowed. I forced myself to lower my expectations. I refused to allow myself to believe he’d come to work things out between us—fix everything that was broken in the middle of a workday.
I was waiting on the stairs near Eugenia’s infamous boob painting, which only reminded me of her ass painting and all the ick I’d discovered in that room, when I heard the pounding on the front door.
True to my word to Wade, I hadn’t tried to convince him to let me back into the room since I’d stolen Eugenia’s letters. It was wrong of me to have taken them and read them, but since when did I care about the fallout in my pursuit of justice? I suppose since I stopped knowing exactly what justice I was pursuing.
In a mood, I pulled the door as hard as I could, for once welcoming the shudder of the heavy wood but annoyed with Jace all over again for not coming to the back door as he usually did. But it wasn’t Jace on the porch. Balancing on the few good porch boards that remained was Marina—and an older woman I’d never seen before wearing jeans and a buffalo-plaid button-down that was three sizes too big.
“Marina?” I hadn’t spoken to Marina since the séance, but I’d seen her that one time with Jace.
“Greer. I’m sorry I didn’t call. I thought maybe you wouldn’t want to see me.”
“How perceptive,” I clipped out. “But you came anyway?”
“Can we come in? This is Sheryll. Jace’s mom.”
Jace’s mother? The drug addict?
Only years of practice allowed me to keep my expression politely neutral as I stepped back into the hall, and the pair slid past the door. Sheryll’s eyes widened at the cavernous space, the spiderwebs of mold making their way a little farther down the walls every day, and the rug disintegrating under our feet.
Suddenly self-conscious about the state of the mansion and what Jace’s mother thought of me, I gestured toward the parlor, and they followed behind. This room, at least, I was able to keep fairly clean.
“May we sit?” Marina asked.
“Please do,” I said, sounding stiff to my own ears as I sat opposite of them on the chaise lounges Eugenia so loved to dramatically pose herself on. “I don’t mean to be rude, but this is an unexpected visit. Does it have something to do with Jace? Because we’re not together anymore, as I’m sure you know.”
Marina at least had the grace to look a bit ashamed.
“I did know, but not for the reasons you think,” she said. “I found out from Sheryll.”
I focused on Jace’s mother for the first time. She was tall, but slight, her Native American heritage readily apparent in her dark, almond-shaped eyes so like Jace’s. But her hair was wiry, her skin crepey. She looked like a woman in her fifties who’d lived a tough life on the streets. If she was back in Jace’s life, I couldn’t see why she’d want to visit me. If she wasn’t…well, I wasn’t going to help her. Whether he openly admitted it or not, I knew how badly her abandonment had affected her son. As far as I was concerned, she’d made her choice a long time ago.
“Nice to meet you,” I said politely.
“And you, Greer Richmond. You’ve made quite an impression on my son.”
“Really? Such an impression that the moment things got complicated, he suddenly couldn’t even stand to be in the same room with me?” Though I’d spoken calmly, it was too much, too soon, a weird and dramatic way to begin the first—and likely only—conversation I’d have with my ex-boyfriend’s mother. But I was sick of holding everything in. If she was here to lecture me, or place Jace up on a pedestal, or worst of all pretend nothing was amiss, I wasn’t here for it.
“Jace is a troubled man—that’s my fault,” she acknowledged, choosing her words carefully. “His father’s as well, but mostly mine. I made my boy afraid of what lurks below the surface. He doesn’t take well to the people he loves hiding their demons. That’s what happened to me. I hid my feelings of despair and turned to drugs. And then I hid the drugs until the day my addiction compelled me to leave my family behind. Jace had no idea—at least, I don’t think he did. He was completely blindsided. And I believe he feels blindsided now. Marina explained to me what happened in this house. How you were inches from death. How Jace saved you. He told me himself how he found out in the minutes and hours afterward that you hadn’t exactly been honest with him.”
I couldn’t help it; I rolled my eyes. “If I have to hear one more time about how angry he is at me…I’m sorry I didn’t tell him that I’d missed a few nights of sleep and I wasn’t feeling myself. That has nothing to do with the fact that I’d been drugged.”
Marina inhaled sharply. Either that was news to her, or she knew how to pull off a convincing act.
“We all have days when we’re not feeling like ourselves. But I believe the root of Jace’s anger comes from a conversation the two of you had at one point before the incident where you allegedly told each other everything.” She made air quotations around everything with her bony fingers. “Forgive me if I’m speaking out of turn, but Jace is under the impression that you have some sort of mental health diagnosis that you didn’t share with him then when you had the chance. And whatever it was, it caused your sudden tailspin.”
