Ethan had learned early that love in the Harlow house was a currency, and he’d been born bankrupt. The first memory he had of his mother, Eleanor, was her standing at the kitchen window, counting coins into a glass jar and muttering that he’d cost her a new dress by arriving three weeks early. It wasn’t said with malice, exactly—just the calm arithmetic of a woman who saw the world as a balance sheet and her children as line items.
The house itself was a faded Victorian on a street where the maple trees grew so thick they swallowed the afternoon light. Inside, the wallpaper peeled in corners like skin after a sunburn, and the air always smelled of old coffee, cheap furniture polish, and the faint, sweet decay of forgotten dreams. His father, Harold, was a retired foreman from the glass plant, a man whose hands were thick as bricks and whose disappointment was a room-filling presence. Eleanor kept a ledger in her head of every dollar spent, every favor owed, every disappointment tallied. And then there was Victoria, the golden child, who could do no wrong.
