Chapter 5
Elara
Water.
I woke drowning—lungs burning, throat raw with salt and cold. My hands clawed at nothing, grasping for Lily's urn, for something solid in the dark current pulling me under.
Then air. Real air. Not the ocean's suffocating grip but the scent of lemon polish and old wood.
I bolted upright, gasping. My chest heaved. The phantom taste of seawater coated my tongue.
This wasn't Rockaway Beach. This wasn't death.
Pale October sunlight filtered through gauze curtains. A carved mahogany bed. Silk sheets tangled around my legs—cream-colored, expensive, untorn by years of restless sleep. My hands flew to my throat, expecting the phantom pressure of water in my lungs.
Smooth skin. No rope burns from the hospital restraints. No bruises from the Glass House's transparent walls where I'd beaten my fists bloody, screaming to be let out.
I looked down at my palms. No scars from clawing at ice and mud, trying to gather Lily's scattered ashes. The skin was whole. Young. The calluses from holding paintbrushes barely formed.
My phone buzzed on the nightstand.
[October 20, Saturday, 6:47 AM]
[St. Valerius Academy - No classes today]
[SAT Mock Exam Results Posted: 1520/1600]
October 20th.
Three months before the pregnancy test. Eight months before Lily's birth. Five years before her death.
I lunged for the nightstand, hands shaking so violently I nearly knocked over the lamp. There—the antique pocket watch Father had left me. Intact. No cracks in the glass face. The delicate gears still turning, marking seconds that shouldn't exist.
I stumbled to the full-length mirror, barely recognizing the girl staring back.
Eighteen years old. Dark hair falling in smooth waves past my shoulders, not the brittle, medication-damaged strands I'd seen in the Glass House's merciless reflections. My collarbones visible but not jutting—I hadn't yet lost thirty pounds from the "recuperation diet" Julian's doctors prescribed. My eyes clear, not hollowed out by sleepless nights in the psych ward.
No bite marks on my neck from where Julian had marked me as his possession.
No track marks in the crook of my elbow from the sedatives they'd forced into my veins.
No surgery scars low on my abdomen from where they'd—
The PTSD hit like a freight train.
Lily's gray face. The social worker's clinical voice: "The foster parents didn't know about the nut allergy." The courtroom where they'd declared me unfit. Julian's wedding to Sloane, their son in a miniature tuxedo while my daughter's ashes blew across a frozen driveway. The Atlantic swallowing me whole, pills dissolving in my stomach, Lily's urn clutched to my chest—
I doubled over, forehead pressed to the cool floorboards. Bile rose in my throat. My vision swam with overlapping timelines—the girl I was and the woman I'd died as, occupying the same body, the same moment.
"I came back," I whispered to the empty room. To Lily, wherever she was now—unborn, unformed, safe in some cosmic waiting room. "I came back to a world where you don't exist yet. Where I can make sure you never have to."
The thought should have brought relief.
Instead, it felt like a second death. Like I'd murdered my daughter all over again by wishing away her existence.
But if I didn't change course—if I followed the same path, made the same mistakes—she would be born only to suffer. To die alone and afraid in a stranger's house while her father danced at his wedding and her mother drowned in the ocean.
I would not let that happen. Not again. Never again.
My gaze fell on the silver compass necklace lying on the dresser. Even from across the room, I could read the inscription: You'll always find your way home.
In my previous life, that necklace had been my anchor. My proof that I belonged in this house, that Julian saw me as more than the housekeeper's daughter. I'd worn it every day for a year, my fingers constantly checking to make sure it was still there, still real.
The sight of it now made my stomach turn.
That necklace had been a leash. A promise I'd mistaken for love.
I sank onto the bed, letting the memories unspool. Not the traumatic flashes but the slow, painful truth of how I'd ended up in Julian's bed at the Four Seasons Boston.
It had started exactly one year ago. The day after my seventeen birthday, when he'd given me the compass necklace in the library. I'd been crying after another round of Victoria's bullying, and he'd appeared like something out of a fairy tale. Tall, composed, achingly beautiful in his tailored suit.
"Your father saved my grandfather's life," he'd said, his voice devoid of warmth but not unkind. "That makes you family, Elara. Anyone who tells you otherwise is wrong."
Then he handed me the necklace and left.
I'd spent the next three hundred and sixty-five days trying to make him look at me that way again.
6:00 AM alarms to brew his favorite Blue Mountain coffee. Handwritten notes tucked into his briefcase: "Have a great day, Julian!" with little hearts dotting the i's. I'd learned about jazz music and bourbon because he liked them. I'd memorized the Wall Street Journal's front page every morning so I could ask intelligent questions at dinner.
I'd waited in the garage when he came home from late nights at the office, a plate of food wrapped in foil. I'd organized his dry cleaning. I'd sat in his study while he worked, silent and adoring, just grateful to be in his presence.
And I'd followed him everywhere I could—lingering outside his gym, "coincidentally" showing up at the same restaurants, engineering excuses to ride in his car. I'd filled my phone with stolen photos: Julian in his shirtsleeves reviewing contracts, Julian's profile backlit by his computer screen, Julian's hands gripping a steering wheel.
My diary from that year was fifty thousand words of obsessive delusion. "Julian smiled at me today." "Julian said my hair looked nice." "Julian let me sit next to him at dinner."
I'd been a stalker. A lovesick child mistaking pity for affection, obligation for romance.
And Julian's patience had worn thin fast.
By last month—by the homecoming dance at St. Valerius Academy—his tolerance had finally snapped. I'd spent a week planning the perfect dress, the perfect hair, the perfect moment to ask him to be my date. I'd cornered him in the parking lot, trembling with hope and terror.
His response had been loud enough for everyone to hear: "Elara, what you're doing is called stalking. It's illegal. Stop."
The lacrosse team had laughed. Someone filmed it. The video went viral in our social circle: "Crazy foster kid thinks she has a chance with Julian Vane."
I'd locked myself in a bathroom stall and cried until my eyes swelled shut.
But Mom had told me to try harder. "Men like the chase," she'd insisted, scrubbing the Blackwood Estate's marble floors on her knees. "He's just playing hard to get. You have to show him you're serious."
So I'd kept trying. Kept pushing. Kept humiliating myself.
Until today. Until this morning, when I would have jumped at the chance to go to Boston with him.
Until that morning at the Four Seasons, where I'd wake up in his bed with no memory of how I got there, my dress torn, his disgust the first thing I saw.
"You drugged me," he'd accused, his gray-blue eyes arctic. "You've been stalking me for a year, and now this? Did you really think forcing yourself on me would make me want you?"
I'd tried to explain. Tried to say I didn't remember, didn't know what happened. But he'd already decided I was guilty.
Three months later, the pregnancy test. Eight months after that, Lily's birth. And then—
No.
I pressed my palm flat against the pocket watch, feeling its steady tick.
Not this time. This time, I would choose differently.
The knock on my door came at 8:50 AM, exactly as it had before.
"Miss Vance." Anna's voice was clipped, professional, edged with the subtle contempt the household staff reserved for people like me—charity cases who didn't know their place. "Mr. Vane Senior requests your presence in the study at nine o'clock. Please be prompt. He dislikes tardiness."
