Chapter 2

Author’s Note: Fair warning—this chapter and the next few contain no sex scenes. I know, I know. You came here for the chaos and the fucking, and instead you’re getting family dysfunction and childhood trauma. Think of this as the origin story nobody asked for but everyone needs to understand why I am the way I am. The fun stuff comes back eventually. For now, buckle up for some Southern Gothic emotional damage and intergenerational bad decisions.

You wanted chaos? First, you get the genealogy of the hurricane.

The Whitmores were old Georgia money, the kind of family that hung their ancestry like a chandelier: heavy, glistening, fragile, and of dubious structural integrity. They weren’t new money, nor clever money, nor industrious money — they were land money, which is to say the luckiest and laziest kind. Cotton built the family fortune in the early nineteenth century, back when cotton was king and nobody with the power to do anything about it bothered to question where, exactly, that cotton came from or whose labor paid the real price — a detail the Whitmores preferred to euphemize into “heritage.”

By the time I entered the story, in the late 1980s, the Whitmores had precisely two assets left: their land and their stubbornness. One of those could be sold. The other would survive nuclear fallout and still insist it was right and that everyone else was being dramatic.

Whitmore’s Rest — the ancestral home — sat in the center of it all like a judgment.

It began life as a proper Federal-style house: red brick, perfectly balanced, unadorned, the architectural equivalent of a stiff-backed schoolmaster. Clean lines. Narrow proportions. A sense of correctness so rigid it made your teeth hurt. Federal houses weren’t built to be pretty; they were built to behave — the architectural version of saying “yes, sir” with your spine.

But values change faster than buildings do.

Around the 1850s, when every aspiring Southern gentleman decided he wanted a plantation house worthy of a Greek temple — the kind of structure that made visitors believe you knew the Iliad even if you didn’t know how to read — the Whitmores renovated. Maybe “renovated” is too gentle a word. They inflated.

A full-height portico rose across the façade like a declaration of self-importance. Four colossal “Doric” columns — Doric if you squinted, generous if you were sober — thrust upward as though holding up the weight of the entire family reputation. The proportions never quite matched the slender Federal skeleton beneath, which meant the house always looked like it was wearing someone else’s clothes two sizes too big.

They added a second wing for symmetry. A double-height hall that swallowed visitors. A grand staircase wide enough for three brides to descend at once, should the family ever feel compelled to stage such a spectacle — and trust me, the Whitmores loved a spectacle.

Then came the greenhouse — sometime between Reconstruction and the First World War, when wealthy Southerners wanted to cosplay European refinement. Georgia did not need a greenhouse — humidity was free and abundant — but the Whitmores built one anyway. Iron frame, painted a self-important black; glass panes that fogged the moment the sun looked at them; vents locked in a losing battle with summer heat. The greenhouse was beautiful in the way useless things often are — decorative, delicate, and deeply impractical to the point of comedy.

By the 1980s, Whitmore’s Rest was a patchwork of eras and insecurities. Paint peeled like old scabs. Floorboards groaned under the weight of too many expectations and not enough repairs. The greenhouse glass was mottled with age. Portraits of dead Whitmores lined the hallways, their eyes following you as if waiting for you to embarrass them just so they’d have something new to haunt.

From the road, Whitmore’s Rest could have passed for historic. Up close, it was simply tired — a grand performance propped up by habit and peeling paint and the kind of denial only old Southern families can afford.

But pride will outlast practicality in the South, and my grandpapa — Jonathan Whitmore — was nothing if not proud. He treated pride the way Baptist preachers treated scripture: something to be quoted, lived, and weaponized whenever the situation called for it. He never simply spoke; he lectured. Every sentence came preloaded with the confidence of a man who believed himself to hold a doctorate in all subjects known to man, and several that weren’t.

Jonathan Whitmore was tall in that way older Southern men can be — not by inches, but by force of will. He walked as if the earth should straighten itself beneath him. His back was so rigid it looked punitive, his shoulders pulled back as though held in place by the invisible harness of duty, lineage, and sheer self-regard.

His hair had gone white in his late fifties — not prematurely, but honestly. White from sun, white from worry, white from decades spent trying to prop up a dying family and a dying state. Mother joked he looked like a Confederate ghost; Jonathan preferred to think he resembled a statesman.

He dressed as though Reconstruction had personally appointed him its ambassador: cream or pale gray suits even in August heat, a pressed vest, polished shoes, and a pocket watch he checked with priestly regularity — as if time might behave better under supervision.

He smelled faintly of pipe tobacco and old leather, a combination that could warm a room or freeze it depending on his mood.

He never raised his voice; he didn’t need to. His silences did the shouting for him. A single lifted brow from Jonathan Whitmore could flatten a room faster than a slammed door.

He believed in Rules — capital-R Rules — and recited them with the gravity of scripture:

“A Whitmore never bends — not to men, not to misfortune.”

“A Whitmore does not apologize for his station.”

“A Whitmore knows the world is always watching.”

“A Whitmore carries history, not feelings.”

To him, these weren’t instructions; they were identity. I grew up with these commandments echoing in my ears, weighted with the suggestion that breaking them might summon some ancient Whitmore curse. And yet, for all his sternness, he had a softness reserved only for two people: Nana — and, for reasons I didn’t understand then, me. Not tenderness — he didn’t possess that — but regard, a kind of solemn approval. He saw a quieter reflection of himself in me, someone he could shape with his lectures and lineage.

Where Grandpapa was stone, Nana — Eileen O’Connor Whitmore — was water: soft where he was rigid, warm where he was cold, bending easily but impossible to break. She was only in her early forties when I was born — young enough to belong wholly to the world of the living, yet already carrying the air of someone whose roots tangled with older things.

She’d been born in Georgia, but she was Irish by right, by inheritance, by myth. Her parents had come from Galway — two Presbyterians in a part of Ireland that did not care for their kind — fleeing sectarian trouble with nothing but grit and stubbornness. In America, they rose from nothing into quiet power, and Nana grew up at the crossroads of three worlds: Presbyterian by teaching, Irish by instinct, Southern by accident.

Her hair had once been the deep red of foxfire and folklore, now streaked generously with gray. Mother nagged her endlessly to dye it, but Nana only smiled. “Some things aren’t meant to be hidden,” she’d say, and the wind would tug at her braids like it agreed.

She carried the Morrígan inside her — not in anger or violence, but in presence. She didn’t have a mean bone in her body, yet no one in the whole county held more quiet power, or inspired more respectful fear. She could silence a room without speaking. She could settle an argument by entering it. Grown men straightened their posture around her without realizing why.

Nana was small and sturdy, built like a woman who trusted her own spine more than other people’s promises. Her eyes were gray-blue — stormlight — capable of warming or warning with equal ease. She smelled of Ivory soap, lavender sachets tucked in drawers, and the faint mineral scent of rain on stone.

She hummed constantly — old Irish airs she insisted were “just church tunes,” though anyone with a hymnal could tell they were older than Christianity in the county.

She didn’t discipline with shouting; she disciplined with silence — a silence that made you examine your own soul.

And she didn’t comfort with speeches; she comforted with simple ritual: a cool hand on your cheek, a gentle pull into her side, a kiss placed on the crown of your head as if sealing a blessing.

People used to say Grandpapa ruled Whitmore’s Rest.

People who knew better kept quiet.

Nana didn’t rule the house; she held it together — and she held me most of all. She treated me not just as her grandson, but as something slightly other, something she recognized. “This one is of the fae” she’d murmur, and folks would think that she was just talking about my Irish blood. (In hindsight, she was gently informing the universe that I’d grow up choosing glitter over football... )

For reasons I didn’t yet understand, she loved me first.

In the fall of 1986, when the roof of the second floor of Whitmore’s Rest began leaking so badly the family had to scatter buckets across the hallway like some kind of sad avant-garde installation, Grandpapa did what proud Southern men do when their world is held together by duct tape and denial: he hired local.

That’s how Hare & Kowalski Construction first set foot on the estate.

Daniel Hare — born Daniel Coelho, back when he still answered to a name Americans couldn’t pronounce without panicking — was twenty-seven. All intensity, all ambition, a man who walked like he was running from something only he could see. His jaw looked carved out of stubbornness; his hands were the kind that made tables go quiet. He didn’t approach Whitmore’s Rest like a job. He treated it like a test he intended to ace so loudly the whole county would hear about it.

Father was just over six feet tall, with the kind of build you don’t get from gyms or protein shakes but from years of work nobody thanks you for. Broad shoulders, strong back, the solid weight of someone used to lifting things heavier than excuses. His black hair was cropped close because anything longer got in the way, and his eyes — hard brown, always assessing — gave the impression he was measuring every room for usefulness.

And yes, he was beautiful. Not “poetic” beautiful or “dangerous” beautiful — just the kind that made people stare before they remembered manners.

People say I look like him. I pray to all the gods that they mean the face and not the personality.

When he worked, sweat and sawdust clung to him like part of the uniform. When he stopped (rarely), he carried the same restless quiet as a man waiting for the world to finally acknowledge his existence.

His partner, Adam Kowalski, was older — early forties — and everything Daniel wasn’t. Calm without being passive. Strong without performing it. Built like a man who could shoulder an entire doorframe and still apologize for brushing against your hydrangeas. Sandy hair that never cooperated, blue eyes that revealed absolutely nothing, and a face that always looked a breath away from saying, “Let’s all take a step back.”

If Daniel kicked down doors, Adam was the one quietly putting the hinges back on — and in old Southern families, the man making the noise gets the praise; the man doing the work gets forgotten.

Together, they made Whitmore’s Rest look smaller than it had ever looked — two men with enough presence to shrink a house that had spent a century trying to intimidate people.

Grandpapa approved of Daniel immediately.

Of course he did. Daniel was everything Grandpapa liked to imagine he had been in his youth — driven, commanding, full of purpose, and blessed with the kind of physical presence that made other men stand straighter.(Not that Grandpapa had ever been any of those things, but self-mythology was his favorite hobby.)

Daniel, in Grandpapa’s eyes, wasn’t just a contractor. He was an improved edition of Jonathan Whitmore, freshly updated, foreign upgrades included.

Adam, on the other hand, was just the help. Solid, competent, essential — the kind of man who actually kept things running — which meant Grandpapa dismissed him the way rich Southern men have dismissed indispensable working-class people for generations: politely, thoroughly, and with complete blindness to their value.

To Grandpapa, Daniel was a man worth noticing. Adam was furniture with opinions.

It was the beginning of everything that would follow.

From the moment Daniel stepped inside the manor, he fell in love — not with my mother, not yet, but with the house. With what it symbolized. Old money. Old names. Old power being held by people who hadn’t worked a day for any of it. He looked at Whitmore’s Rest and saw a future where he — son of small farmers in Rio Grande do Sul, sent to America on money his family didn’t have — could finally stop feeling like an outsider.

And then he fell in lust with Margaret O’Connor Whitmore (aka Mother).

Mother was eighteen then, and beautiful in that porcelain-doll, do-not-touch kind of way old Southern families cultivate on purpose. Pale skin that bruised under too much sunlight, strawberry-blonde hair pulled so tightly into buns it looked like she’d been born already obedient. She was the kind of pretty that made people speak softly around her, the kind of delicate elegance you admire from a distance because you’re afraid your breath alone might crack it.

She moved like a girl who’d been taught that existing too loudly was a punishable offense. A girl sculpted into a lady before she was old enough to learn what she actually wanted.

Beautiful? Absolutely.

Warm? Not particularly.

Real? Almost not at all.

Daniel took one look at her and saw perfection.

Not her, mind you — but what she represented.

Everything he’d been clawing his way toward since stepping off the plane alone at seventeen: respectability, legitimacy, a name with history behind it instead of soil under its nails.

And yes, he fell in lust. Not with her soul — he didn’t know she had one yet — but with the immaculate surface of her. With the posture. The poise. The fine-boned beauty that looked like wealth even when the bank accounts said otherwise.

Mother wasn’t drawn to his personality — she didn’t know him long enough to have opinions. What she felt was heat. Disruption. A handsome, confident young man who came from nowhere and looked at her like she wasn’t a museum piece.