Free Web NovelChapter 17: Chapter 17 Grandma Alice
_Author’s POV_
The Ashthorne family home sat on a quiet street in the older part of the city, the kind of neighborhood that had been expensive for so long it had stopped needing to prove it. The house itself was large and well-maintained, cream-colored with dark shutters, surrounded by the kind of garden that required actual attention rather than neglect dressed up as wildness.
It had been sitting with a property management company for three years.
Now it was waking up.
Celeste had sent a team in two days prior, cleaners, painters for the east wing, a contractor for the back gate, and two men to sort through the storage items that had accumulated during the rental period. The front garden had been freshly cut. New curtains were being hung in the main sitting room. The whole place smelled of paint and cut grass and something that was slowly becoming habitable again.
Celeste was standing on the front path with a clipboard and a phone pressed to her ear when a car pulled up.
She noticed it because it stopped too abruptly. The kind of stop that came from someone who had seen something that surprised them and hit the brakes before their brain caught up with their foot.
The door opened.
Grandma Alice stepped out.
She was seventy-one years old, small and sharp-eyed, dressed in a cardigan despite the warmth and carrying the particular energy of a woman who had decided something on the drive over and arrived ready to act on it. She was Rowena’s maternal grandmother — technically. The relationship was more complicated than the title suggested, and had been for years, but the title was what she used and what most people knew her by.
She stood on the pavement and looked at the house.
Workers moved past the windows. A painter descended a ladder on the east side. Two men carried boxes out through the front door and loaded them into a van.
Celeste lowered her phone.
"Alice," she said, with the pleasantness of someone who had encountered this woman before and was already calculating.
"What is this?" Alice’s voice was sharp. She gestured at the activity around her. "What are they doing to this house?"
"Preparing it," Celeste said simply.
"For what?"
"Rowena is coming home."
The words landed and Alice went very still.
For a moment her face did something complicated, a rapid internal sequence that moved too quickly to follow cleanly.
Then it settled into something that looked like distress but had a particular quality to it, a performance of distress.
"Coming home," she repeated. "Why? Kaelen is divorcing her?"
"Rowena is returning to the Ashthorne estate," Celeste said, in a tone that offered no additional information.
"That’s the same thing." Alice’s voice began to rise. "He’s throwing her out. After everything that family put her through, after everything her mother sacrificed, he’s sending her back with nothing." freeweɓnovēl.coɱ
"No one said anything about nothing," Celeste said.
But Alice wasn’t listening anymore. She was already back in her car.
Celeste watched the car pull away and stood for a moment on the path.
Then she picked her phone back up and dialed Velvet.
"Rowena needs to know," she said, when the call connected. "Alice just left here. She’s going to the Varkos estate."
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Alice arrived at the Moonreign Pack estate forty minutes later. ƒгeewёbnovel.com
She didn’t call ahead. She didn’t ask to be announced.
She walked through the gate while the guard was still reaching for his radio and made it halfway across the drive before Hannah appeared at the front door with the expression of someone who had been warned by phone thirty seconds earlier and had spent those thirty seconds praying for more time.
"Grandma Alice..."
"Where is my granddaughter?"
The voice carried into the entrance hall. Velvet, who had been waiting near the foot of the stairs since Celeste’s call, appeared immediately.
"Grandma Alice," she said. "Please come inside. I’ll let Luna Rowena know you’re here."
Alice swept past her into the entrance hall and stood in the center of it, taking in the space with sharp, darting eyes.
"This is her house," she announced, to no one in particular. "She built this. Everything in this hall, she paid for." Her voice cracked slightly, the crack of a woman working herself toward something. "And now they’re throwing her out."
Grandmama Maelis appeared in the sitting room doorway.
The two older women regarded each other.
Maelis said nothing. But she stepped back from the doorway, which was its own kind of invitation.
Alice followed her inside.
Rowena arrived four minutes later, slightly breathless, having come down from her room at a pace that was technically not running. She stopped in the sitting room doorway and took in the scene, Alice in the center of the room, upright and trembling with performed agitation, Maelis in her chair watching with her calm eyes.
"Grandma Alice," Rowena said.
Alice turned. Her eyes were bright and slightly wet. "They’re fixing up your mother’s house," she said.
"Celeste has workers in there. They’re getting it ready." Her voice shook. "He’s divorcing you. I knew it. I knew this family would do this to you."
"Grandma Alice." Rowena crossed the room and took the older woman’s hands. Steady and unhurried. "Listen to me."
"Don’t calm me down, Rowena. Don’t..."
"It’s a misunderstanding," Rowena said.
Alice stopped.
"The house is being prepared because I asked Celeste to look into some maintenance," Rowena said. Her voice was even and completely believable. "The east wing needed repainting. The back gate was damaged. I’ve been meaning to have it sorted for months." She held Alice’s gaze. "No one is divorcing me."
Alice searched her face. "Then why..."
"Because the house belongs to our family and it needs care," Rowena said. "That’s all."
The room was quiet.
Alice looked at her for a long moment, her eyes moving across Rowena’s expression with the particular attention of someone who wanted to be convinced and was looking for permission to let themselves believe it.
"You’re staying?" she asked.
"I’m staying," Rowena said.
Alice exhaled. The trembling stopped. The bright agitation in her eyes settled into something calmer, and she patted Rowena’s hands with the satisfaction of a woman who had come a long way to hear exactly this.
"Good," she said. "Good."
Rowena guided her gently to a chair.
From across the room, Maelis watched the whole thing with an expression that was unreadable. But her eyes, when they met Rowena’s briefly over Alice’s head, held something that looked almost like recognition.
Two women who knew exactly what they were doing.
Neither of them said a word about it.
