Page 151 of Jayson
We burned the past down. All of it. And for once in my life, I don’t feel cursed by fate. I feel chosen.
57
JAYSON
Change isn’t a flick of a switch.
It’s slower. Sharper. Like erosion—silent until one day you look back and realize the landscape of who you were no longer exists.
I used to think change was weakness. That the only way to survive was to stay the same: hard, brutal, untouchable. But love changes you. So does loss. And pain. And redemption. It strips you bare, shows you every piece you broke off to make room for survival—and then asks if you want to build something better.
I used to kill to feel powerful. Now I build to stay human. And maybe that’s the biggest shift of all. Not that I changed—but that I let myself.
The biggest change for us isn't war. It's peace.
Not the blood-stained kind we used to claw through, but the quiet kind—the one that comes with decisions about paint colors and drainage systems and whether to keep the original balustrade on the second-floor landing.
We’re rebuilding the estate.
Not selling it. Not abandoning it. Reclaiming it.
Keira loves it there. I see it in the way her fingers trail alongthe banister, the way her voice softens when she walks past the study. That house holds our history—both the kind that tried to ruin us and the kind we created ourselves. But it’s time. Time to strip away the bones without burying the history.
We’re keeping the structure. The soul. But the guts? They're getting torn out.
New electrics. Updated plumbing. Every pipe, every wire—gutted and replaced. No more flickering lights or dodgy pressure in the guest showers. No more echoes of old sins humming through faulty copper.
The decor’s coming into the present, too. Keira worked with a designer to preserve the house’s original gothic character—arches, stained glass, intricate molding—but she’s adding warmth. Earth tones. Lighter wood. Something that says we survived instead of we’re still fighting.
She wants a real kitchen. A sunroom. A reading nook off the second landing. She says it like it’s just about the layout. But I know better. She’s planting roots in every corner of that house so the ghosts can’t grow back. And me? I’d bulldoze the whole damn thing if she asked me to. But she didn’t. She asked me to help her heal it. So we are.
The hardest goodbye in all this? Nina.
She’s been with us longer than most blood relatives ever bothered to stick around. Raised me like I mattered. For years, she kept the books, the secrets, the family from tearing itself apart at the seams. And now, above every protest I could come up with, she says she’s ready.
She’s retiring. To Italy, of all places.
A little vineyard near her cousin’s place in the hills outside Florence. She showed me pictures on her phone—stone cottages, olive groves, a view of the valley that looks like something out of a poem.
“It’s time, Jayson,” she said, pressing her palm to mine theway she used to when I was a kid with bloodied knuckles and no direction. “You don’t need me anymore.”
She’s wrong, of course. I’ll always need her.
But I didn’t stop her.
Because Nina—who sacrificed everything for a family that took too much—deserves a life now. A slow one. With wine and laughter and sun-warmed linens hanging on a line. She deserves peace that doesn’t demand she stand guard over broken men trying to find their way.
I made her promise she’d visit at least twice a year.
She made me promise not to cry when she left.
We both lied.
The day she packed her bags, Keira helped her fold every blouse, every scarf. They talked in hushed voices I couldn’t quite hear from the hall. When I finally stepped in, Nina hugged me without a word, just gripped my face in her hands and stared at me like she was memorizing it.
“You built something good,” she said, her voice thick. “Make sure it lasts.”
I will. For her. For Keira. For Lila. For every girl the system forgot, every name we couldn’t save, every scar that still aches when it rains.
