Page 86 of The Rival's Obsession
Jaxon tilts his head. “Break?”
“The fracture,” I clarify, leaning forward and pulling the cheesecake closer like it’s fuel. “Something happened to him. Something formative. Dante’s a flame. He lashes out, burns hot, doesn’t know how to hold back. But Grant—he’s quiet. Controlled. He compartmentalizes like a machine.”
“So?”
“So, machines don’t build themselves that well unless they’ve been broken first.”
Jaxon makes a low, thoughtful sound, like he’s enjoying watching my brain spin. “Where do you want to start?”
“The beginning.”
The cursor blinks like it’s daring me to keep going.
Grant Harrow, age sixteen.
It should’ve been the year everything accelerated—early college credits, prestigious internships, interviews about legacy and leadership. Crafted sound bites over champagne flutes and monogrammed cufflinks. The fast track to becoming everything the Harrow name demanded.
Instead, there’s a void. A silent rupture in the record.
That’s where it starts.
One obituary.
Sylvia Harrow, beloved wife of William Harrow, passed suddenly at home. Survived by her husband and son.
But Jaxon was able to find digitized police reports.
Cause of death: blunt-force trauma sustained during a fall over the second-story railing.
“That sounds sketchy AF.” Jax scans the files with me, both of us invested in the history now.
Aside from this, there are no headlines. No scandal. No follow-up interviews. Just a cold fact buried beneath a list of charitable donations made in her honor and a closed-casket funeral held four days later.
But it’s the location that catches me.
The Harrow family home.
Insidethe home.
The kind of fall that can shatter the skull and break the neck—clean, instant, fatal.
I pull up the archived floor plan of the estate—something from a decades-old architecture feature. The house is sprawling. Cold. Symmetrical in that old-money way that prizes aesthetics over warmth. The grand staircase cuts through the center of the foyer like a spine.
“If Grant’s father was here,” I point to the study, “and she fell here...”
“There is no way the dad could have done it.”
He reported he had been holed up in his study for hours. Phone records and surveillance logs back him up—timelines neatly arranged, like a spreadsheet prepared for grief.
“Unless someone is lying.” I tap my fingernail on my tooth, thinking.
Every single detail hinges on Grant’s word.
It’s Grant who called emergency services.
Grant who told the responding officer his father was in the study when it happened.
Grant who testified—privately—that he came out of his room to see her at the bottom of the stairs.
