Chapter 17 - GERVASE WITHOUT A WIFE
I had spent eighteen months after Elowen’s death being:
Widower.
Father.
Son.
Architect.
Crisis manager.
Then the legal cases slowed.
I discovered silence.
Terrible.
I started cooking badly.
Elowen had cooked.
Drusilla had taken over after.
Now nobody.
Ysella and I ate eggs for dinner too often.
Claire intervened.
“You own a stove.”
“I fear it.”
“You design buildings.”
“Buildings don’t require seasoning.”
We learned.
Ysella stirred pancake batter.
I burned pancakes.
She said:
“Grandma would say waste.”
I stopped.
“What do you say?”
“Make more.”
Good.
We did.
Food was not central trauma here.
Still, ordinary mistakes became chances to remove Drusilla’s voice from our house.
At school, Ysella drew family pictures.
Me.
Her.
Elowen as a star once.
Then stopped drawing the star.
I panicked internally.
Maya said:
“She is not forgetting her mother because she changes a drawing.”
Right.
Children grieve differently.
I had turned memory into another obligation.
I corrected.
Then I dated once.
Too early.
Stopped.
Later again.
No secret heiress.
No dramatic savior.
A civil engineer named Mara Voss.
Kind.
Divorced.
Two teenagers.
We dated slowly.
Ysella met her after nine months.
No one called her Mom.
Good.
Drusilla learned through Margot? There is no Margot here. Adrian told? Better family grapevine.
She sent:
So now another woman gets my place.
I did not reply.
No one “got” Drusilla’s place.
That was the whole lesson.
Relationships are not chairs at a head table.
Then my architecture practice received a project:
Renovation of an old hotel.
I nearly refused because Briar Crown.
Then didn’t.
Trauma does not get to own building types.
We won.
Worked.
Life continued.
The criminal and civil cases were mostly done.
But one legal issue remained.
Drusilla appealed the bank-fraud conviction.
Her argument:
Because Palisade required my final signature, her preliminary representations could not constitute an attempt to obtain loan funds through false authority.
Serious legal question.
Not absurd.
The appellate court would decide.
May you like
And I had to resist wanting law to bend because I hated what she did.
Accuracy mattered even for her.
