Theo was maybe a little lonely, but he didn’t bring people home anymore.

Genni sent him the Baltimore Sun, sometimes, for the financial section. He started thinking about the money that hadn’t been touched by his father’s crimes, and how he wanted to help his friends, maybe fund some of their business ventures. Ways to invest, improve. A better way to be wealthy than what his father had done. He studied every bit of news in those papers, feeling Baltimore echoing—thinking about the person he had been.

He didn’t want to be that person. He wanted to do something else. He tried to bury the bitterness, the sense of how nothing was fair and never would be, but sometimes—

He saw an engagement announcement in the paper. A picture, blue eyes, a yellow dress.

He smoked his last pack of cigarettes, ashing right over the grinning faces of people he didn’t, it turned out, know very well at all.

And then, at the end of that next July, Father died.

Killed himself in prison. Too cowardly to live with the consequences of what he had done.

Theo was relieved. He grieved against his will. He was, almost immediately, very wealthy indeed.

So he came home. Back to the mansion, which he had renovated and repaired. Back to bitching with Genni over cocktails, and glasses of absinthe with Phil, and Tom sending him recipes, trying to remind Theo to eat. Investing in his friends, his Gwynns family whom everyone still hated. Making more money, silently donating, not to Gwynns, but to the public schools. Grinding, even now.

He made something of himself, not as a Beaumont, but as him—Theo. He caught, every once in a while, a strange, solemn look on Mother’s face, and he figured he had better start planning for a child of his own. Maybe everything would be a little easier if he just did what was expected of him.

Alexia was a lovely woman, with a truly stunning laugh like sex on concrete, and she and Mother spent hours together, very happily, and it wasn’t her fault, not really, that he couldn’t—

And Jasper was pink and blond and chubby and so fucking cheerful and oh, how Theo loved him—

And Jack was a father, three times over, when Theo couldn’t bear to try again, another fault, another failure—

And he let Jasper play with the hunting dogs and nurse the runt of the litter by hand—

Tom had a little girl with toasted brown skin, Gabrielle, and he was so delighted, his doughy face beautiful as he held her in his arms, and he sent her up to Gwynns, made sure they all looked out for her, didn’t let the stain of his past touch her—

And little Hya Dumont dug in the gardens with Jasper, getting dirty and laughing and trailing mud all through the house—