Jane.

I didn’t love her, not really. I knew that now.

I’d wanted to. So much. In the beginning, it had felt so easy. I could just love someone else. I could have a fresh start. I could put everything with Bea behind me, forget what she’d done, what I’d done, what we’d done, and start over with Jane. Smart, funny Jane who saw the good parts of me, never the bad.

Bea had learned the truth about my family eventually. That I hadn’t spoken to my mom or my brother since I was eighteen even though they were both good people who hadn’t done anything wrong. Their only crime was that they were a reminder of how thoroughly mediocre my beginnings had been.

Jane didn’t know that, though. She didn’t know that my mom still tried to email me through the public address I had at Southern Manors, or that I deleted them as soon as they came in. Or that when my brother had tried to send us a Christmas card, I’d sicced our lawyers on him, implying that he was harassing us.

With Jane, I was getting a blank slate.

But a part of me had always known it was never going to be that easy. I might’ve told myself that I hid Bea away to protect the business, that it was better the world think she was dead than a murderer, but the truth was … I couldn’t bear to give her up.

It was that simple. That fucking terrifying.

I still loved her.

That’s what this had been, fucked up as it was. Love. Trying to save her from the outside world—and from herself.

“This is the best thing for you,” I’d told her that first night when I’d put her in the panic room as she’d gaped at me, confused and angry, and maybe a little scared.

And I’d believed that. I still did. But Jesus, now she was loose, in the house with Jane, resilient Jane who I should’ve let go from the start. She didn’t deserve this. I should never have proposed to her, not when I was still going into Bea’s room, seeing her, talking to her, sleeping with her. But I’d wanted to give Jane the thing she’d wanted. I’d somehow, stupidly, thought this might work out. That there was a way out that ended with all of us getting what we wanted.

And I’d wanted both Jane and Bea. Hadn’t been willing to give either of them up, keeping Bea upstairs, keeping Jane by promising to marry her, and now we were all fucked.

I should’ve known that Jane would figure this out. She kept getting so close, and for all that naïve young woman act, I knew she was as sharp as a drawer of fucking knives.

I, on the other hand? Curious, impulsive, greedy.

With a groan, I managed to get on my knees. I wasn’t tied up or restrained in any way, just locked in an inescapable room.

Except that it had never been completely inescapable. There was one guaranteed way out. There always had been. I was just the only one who knew it because I was the one who’d built this fucking house.

It was dangerous, though. Stupid, even. And possibly deadly.

But I had to try.

PART XI

JANE

35

“You’re nothing like he described.”

I stand there in the hallway, my arm still aching from where I hit Eddie with that goddamn pineapple. I hit him too hard, I know that. And in a weird spot. I could still feel bone crunching, could see the teeth on the carpet. We had left him in there, closing and locking the doors behind us, and there’s no sound, no sign that he’s conscious or even alive in there.

And Bea Rochester is standing in front of me.

Alive.

Because Eddie had her locked in their fucking panic room. Oh, and apparently talked to her about me.

It’s all so bizarre I can’t even think how to reply, finally stuttering, “The p-police. We need to call—”

“What I need,” Bea says, loudly sighing, “is a fucking drink.”

* * *

Bea moves down the stairs with the same confidence and focus I’d always imagined she’d have, her head high, her movements sure. I trail behind, arms wrapped around my middle, wishing I weren’t still in my jogging gear from earlier this morning.

Bea is already in the kitchen when I get downstairs, going into the butler’s closet. It’s a narrow room between the kitchen and the laundry room with a little sink, wineglasses, and several bottles of wine, plus the whiskey Eddie likes.

I hang back as Bea opens a cabinet, her eyes moving over the bottles of wine in their little wooden cubbies. “Did the two of you drink the 2009 Mouton Rothschild?” she asks, glancing over her shoulder at me, and I stand there, my hands at my sides, arm still aching from the force I’d used in my hit to Eddie’s head.

I feel like what I am—an imposter.

And I can’t believe how … calm she is. How in control. I feel like the entire world has been turned on its head, and she’s selecting wine.

But Bea only shakes her head, fingers dancing over the bottles. “The 2007 is still here. That’ll do.”

She plucks the bottle from its hiding place, then slides two glasses from the rack affixed under the counter, her movements smooth and sure.

And for the first time, I realize that this really was her house. It could never have been mine, and it sure as fuck wasn’t Eddie’s.

Pausing between the kitchen and the dining room, she glances at me again. “Grab the corkscrew, will you?”

That I can do, at least, and I open one of the drawers in the kitchen, pulling out the corkscrew before following Bea into the dining room.

She opens the wine, pouring us each a glass, then gestures for me to sit. She takes her own seat at the head of the table, and for a moment, I wonder if I’m supposed to sit at the other end, the two of us facing off like medieval queens.

Instead, I sit at her left, not in the chair closest to her, but one over, leaving some space between us, but not a football field length of oak table.

This is the same place where she posed for that Southern Living interview a few years ago, only now she’s wearing wrinkled silk pajamas, her nails a ragged mess. But even though she looks like hell—pale, her hair longer, split ends fraying over her shoulders, dark circles beneath her eyes—underneath I can see the Bea Rochester I’d spent so much time imagining. The woman who built an empire out of gingham and bowls shaped like fruit, a brand modeled after a certain lifestyle she hadn’t been born into but clawed her way toward just the same.