Author: Momo Chan

My boyfriend just spent three months backpacking across Europe with the woman of his dreams—the one who got away. Now, he’s back, staring at my slightly rounded stomach with a look of pure, unadulterated rage. “Who the hell did you sleep with, Piper?” Harrison barked, his voice echoing through the penthouse. I didn’t answer. Instead, I let my gaze flicker toward his best friend, Hudson Wilde, who was standing by the bar, nursing a drink and watching the drama unfold. Harrison froze. Then, without a word, he swung. His fist connected with Hudson’s jaw, the sound sickeningly wet. Hudson, who had been enjoying the show a second ago, stumbled back, stunned. He wiped a streak of blood from his lip, and before Harrison could pivot, he lunged back. He landed a clean hook right across Harrison’s nose. “Are you out of your mind? I never touched her!” Hudson roared. They went at it, blow for blow, a messy, expensive brawl on the designer rug. I watched them for a moment, completely unfazed, and then quietly slipped out of the lounge. Once I was safely in the hallway, I gave my stomach a firm pat. The “bump” flattened instantly. Who said I was pregnant? I just overdid it at the all-you-can-eat pasta bar for dinner. 1 To avoid the inevitable barrage of frantic calls, I blocked both Harrison and Hudson on my way home. I retreated to my apartment and sank into a lukewarm bath, trying to wash off the scent of Harrison’s expensive cologne and his even more expensive betrayal. I was just drifting into a half-sleep when my phone buzzed on the tile floor. A message from an unknown number lit up the screen: Open the door in sixty seconds, or I’m breaking it down. I mean it. Harrison was the type to act without speaking, but this had Hudson’s signature all over it. Hudson was petty, vindictive, and never let a grudge go cold. I knew he’d come looking for me to settle the score for that punch, I just didn’t expect him to be this fast. Knowing him, the “breaking down the door” part wasn’t an exaggeration. I folded. I’m in the bath. Give me five minutes. Hudson replied instantly: Fine. Five minutes. Clock is ticking. I didn’t dare linger. I scrambled out of the tub, rinsed off the bubbles, and threw on a silk slip dress—the first thing I grabbed. When I swung the door open, Hudson was standing there, chest heaving, looking ready to burn the building down. But the moment his eyes hit my bare shoulders and the damp silk clinging to my skin, he went rigid. “Could you maybe put some actual clothes on?” he snapped, his ears turning a frantic shade of pink. I gave him a look of feigned innocence. “I was getting ready for bed. Is there a dress code for my own apartment?” Hudson choked on his next words, then pivoted. “Why did you tell Harrison I was the one who knocked you up?” “Wasn’t it you?” I countered, leaning against the doorframe. Out of all Harrison’s friends, Hudson and I were the ones who hated each other most. It was a simple dynamic: I loathed his sharp tongue and elitist attitude; he loathed my “social climber” persona. For the three months Harrison was away with Isabella—his “Golden Girl,” his untouchable muse—Hudson had hovered over me like a vulture. He claimed he was just making sure I didn’t embarrass his best friend by sleeping around, but he was a constant, suffocating shadow. If he hadn’t made my life such a misery, I wouldn’t have turned to emotional eating as a coping mechanism. Every meal for ninety days had been a twelve-course feast of spite. Hudson looked like he was about to have an aneurysm. “I haven’t so much as brushed a finger against you, Piper. How the hell could I get you pregnant? Was it immaculate conception?” I smiled, saying nothing. I stepped closer, looping my arms around his neck, my breath ghosting over his skin. “Well, you’re touching me now, aren’t you?” Hudson froze. Then, as if he’d been scorched by a hot iron, he practically leaped back, shoving my hands away. “What is wrong with you?” I watched the flush creep from his neck to his forehead and laughed. “I’m just giving you what you wanted, Hudson. Attention.” “You… you are absolutely shameless!” He was stammering now, his usual cool composure shattered. “You’ve told me that a thousand times,” I said, checking my nails. “Get a new line.” He ground his teeth, muttered something about not wasting his time on a “lost cause,” and turned to leave. But he only made it three steps down the hall before he spun back around. I arched an eyebrow. “Change your mind, Hudson?” He looked at me, his expression unreadable. “Are you really… is there really a baby?” “Don’t you have eyes?” I pushed my stomach out again, holding my breath to mimic the bloat. Hudson glanced down, his face darkening. “You’re dead, Piper. Harrison might let a lot of things slide, but if you actually cheated on him? He’ll ruin your family. You’ll be lucky if you’re not out on the street by morning.” I didn’t flinch. I reached out and toyed with the collar of his jacket. “Then why don’t you help me?” In terms of net worth, the Wilde family was on par with the Montgomerys. In terms of sheer political clout, they were actually a step above. Hudson let out a sharp, bitter laugh. He grabbed my chin, forcing me to look at him. “Why would I help you? You just framed me for an affair. I should be the one handing you the eviction notice.” “Because,” I said, my voice dropping to a shameless purr, “I know I’m special to you.” The laugh he let out this time was louder, incredulous. “What part of your delusional brain thinks you’re ‘special’ to me?” “You spent three months watching my every move,” I said simply. “Nobody stares that hard at something they don’t care about.” “I was watching you because I can’t stand you! I was looking for a reason to get rid of you!” “And yet,” I smiled, “you never looked away.” Hudson’s face went through three different shades of Pale. He looked like he wanted to scream. I decided to twist the knife, running my thumb over his bottom lip—a slow, provocative move. “Admit it, Hudson. You’re obsessed. You just haven’t realized it yet.” He turned a shade of red I didn’t think was biologically possible. He ripped my hand away, his voice trembling with fury. “Harrison is going to destroy you.” With that final threat, he practically fled toward the elevator. It wasn’t a walk; it was an escape. I leaned against the door, a cold smirk playing on my lips. Poor boy. 2 Hudson might be a hothead, but he was surprisingly sheltered when it came to women. He was an easy mark. However, he was right about one thing: Harrison Montgomery was not a man to be trifled with. And he certainly wasn’t the type to take a blow to his ego—or his “property”—lying down. Harrison was the heir to a multibillion-dollar empire. My family’s assets were essentially pocket change compared to his. If he decided to go nuclear, the West family would be vaporized within a week. But honestly? I didn’t care. My family consisted of a father who viewed me as a bargaining chip, a stepmother who hated my existence, and two half-siblings who took after her. They could lose everything for all I cared. My only real concern was that once Harrison threw me out, my father would try to sell me off to some ancient, lecherous business associate to cover his debts. But I’d cross that bridge when I burned it. I had barely closed the door for thirty seconds when the bell rang again. Thinking Hudson had come back for a round two of shouting, I yanked it open. Instead, I found myself staring into Harrison’s icy, shadowed eyes. Before I could even breathe out a sarcastic greeting, he grabbed my arm and shoved his way in, slamming me against the foyer wall. His hand clamped onto my jaw, his grip borderline painful. “Who was it, Piper? Tell me who you slept with.” Harrison was usually the embodiment of ‘old money’ restraint. Seeing him this unhinged was a rare thrill. I’d managed to break his mask twice in one day. I couldn’t shake him off, so I did the next best thing—I brought my heel down hard on his polished leather shoe. “None of your business,” I hissed. Harrison grunted in pain, his grip loosening just enough for me to duck under his arm and bolt for the living room. But he was faster. He caught me from behind, his arm wrapping around my waist like a steel band, and hauled me toward the bedroom. He threw me onto the bed and hovered over me, his shadow swallowing me whole. I stopped fighting. I just lay there, limp and indifferent. “Go ahead,” I said, my voice flat. “If you don’t mind the leftovers.” Harrison flinched as if I’d slapped him. His gaze dropped to my stomach, and the rage in his eyes flickered into something darker, something almost disgusted. He reached out and grabbed my throat—not to hurt, but to possess. “You have three days,” he spat, his voice low and dangerous. “Get rid of the brat. Do it, and maybe I’ll consider giving you a chance to explain yourself. If not… don’t say I didn’t warn you.” He let go of me as if I were something contaminated and stood up, straightening his cuffs. I sat up slowly, staring at him with cold clarity. “I think we should just end this, Harrison.” His hand paused on his tie. A flash of genuine shock crossed his face, followed quickly by a sneer of pure condescension. “You think you have the right to end this? You’re a placeholder, Piper. Nothing more.” “Isabella is single now,” I reminded him. “You don’t need a placeholder.” Harrison had been in love with Isabella for a decade. But Isabella had chosen his older brother. Six months ago, his brother died in a freak accident, leaving her a grieving widow. Three months ago, Harrison took her on that trip to “help her heal.” Marrying your brother’s widow was a bit of a scandal, even in their circles, but for a man like Harrison, it was just another acquisition. Harrison leaned over me one last time, his voice a chilling whisper. “Remember this, Piper: no one tells me what to do. This relationship ends when I decide I’m bored, and not a second before. You’re a smart girl. You know what happens to people who lose my protection.” My heart sank. He was right. In this world, I had no leverage. I was just a ghost inhabiting someone else’s life. 3 Three years ago, my father tried to marry me off to a sixty-year-old billionaire with a reputation for “unusual” tastes. I was desperate. I noticed that Harrison Montgomery looked at Isabella with a hunger that bordered on madness. Since Isabella and I shared a certain… aesthetic—the same high cheekbones, the same dark, wavy hair—I leaned into the resemblance. I mimicked her grace, her soft-spoken nature, her wardrobe. I seduced him on a night when he was drowning in whiskey and self-pity over Isabella’s engagement to his brother. He had been aggressive at first, but once he had me in bed, he stopped, as if realizing I was just a counterfeit. But he kept me anyway. For three years, I was his shadow-version of Isabella. We were “dating” in name, but everyone knew I was just a high-end mistress. Hudson, in particular, made sure I never forgot it. But the weirdest thing happened. Despite knowing I was just a stand-in, I actually started to care for him. Once, while he was drunk, he promised he’d marry me after his brother and Isabella were settled. I was naive enough to believe in “growing to love someone.” Then his brother died. And I knew the moment I heard the news that my time was up. Harrison would finally get the real thing. I’d been waiting for the axe to fall for months. When he told me he was taking her on a world tour, I expected the breakup. Instead, he told Hudson to “look after” me. And Hudson, the loyal dog, took it literally. He watched me so closely I couldn’t even go to a bar without him appearing like a vengeful spirit. I was so stressed and miserable that I ate my feelings, gained six pounds, and ended up being accused of carrying his best friend’s secret child. I was starting to think Hudson did this on purpose. That bastard. 4 Harrison gave me seventy-two hours to “fix” the problem. Since there was no problem to fix, I spent the time at home, lounging in my pajamas and ignoring the world. On the second night, a text came in from Hudson. Are you dead yet? Sometimes, when you hate someone enough, it starts to feel like a twisted kind of intimacy. I didn’t block him this time. Still here, unfortunately, I replied. Hudson: Shocking. I’m surprised Harrison didn’t kill you on the spot. Me: Don’t worry. Bitchy weeds never die. Hudson: True. You’ve always had a high survival instinct. There was a long pause. The “typing…” bubbles appeared and disappeared for nearly a minute. Hudson: What are you going to do about the kid? I blinked. He actually sounded concerned. The mischief in me bubbled up. The kid is innocent. I’m keeping it, obviously. Hudson: Are you insane? He’ll ruin you! Me: So let him. I have nothing left to lose anyway. My grandmother—the only person who ever truly loved me—was gone. I was just drifting. Hudson didn’t reply for a long time. Then: Who’s the father? Really? Me: Too many candidates to count. Hudson: Dammit, Piper! I laughed so hard I nearly fell off my sofa. Hudson knew he’d been watching me, but he wasn’t there 24/7. There was one night he’d been busy, and I’d gone to a club and ordered a round of male models just to spite him. He’d found me at dawn and dragged me out. He clearly thought that was the night. 5 By the third day, the walls were closing in. I went to a high-end hotel bar to lose myself in a few martinis. I was halfway through my third when Harrison’s security detail swarmed the booth. They didn’t ask; they just grabbed me, hauled me out to a waiting black SUV, and drove me straight to a private surgical clinic. When we arrived, Harrison was already there, standing in the sterile hallway like an avenging angel. Between the gin and the sheer exhaustion, my filter was gone. “Harrison! Are you so obsessed with your sister-in-law that you’ve lost your mind? This whole ‘substitute’ thing is pathetic. It’s sick!” Harrison didn’t yell. He just stepped forward, his hand like a vise on my jaw, forcing me to look up. “I’ll ask one last time. Whose is it?” “Your father’s!” I spat. Harrison’s eyes went dark. A terrifying, cold smile touched his lips. “Fine. You want to be difficult?” He turned to the surgeon waiting nearby. “Do it. And don’t bother with the anesthesia. She should feel every bit of it.” The doctor blanched. “Mr. Montgomery… that’s… we usually—” “I said do it,” Harrison snapped. I stared at him, my blood turning to ice. “You’re a monster. Harrison, stop!” “You chose this, Piper,” he said, stepping back as the nurses moved in. “You couldn’t keep your legs closed. Now you pay the price.” I started to struggle, panic finally setting in. “Harrison! Wait! I’m not—!” “Harrison!” A sharp, mocking voice echoed down the hall. Hudson Wilde walked toward us, his hands in his pockets, looking as casual as if he were at a garden party. Harrison frowned. “Hudson? What the hell are you doing here?” Hudson looked at me, then at the doctors, and let out a long, theatrical sigh. “I’m the father, Harrison. I figured I should probably be present for the ‘procedure.’” I froze. What?

🌟 Continue the story here 👉🏻 📲 Download the “MotoNovel” app 🔍 search for “391782”, and watch the full series ✨! #MotoNovel

I was doom-scrolling in the back of an Uber, exhausted from overtime, when the algorithm decided to ruin my life. It was a thread on a relationship advice forum, the title screaming in bold: [My husband’s sexual appetite is insatiable. I physically can’t keep up. Help.] A top comment, with thousands of upvotes, shattered my worldview in two sentences: [Outsource it. Find him a mistress—someone clean, fresh out of college. Those wide-eyed, naive girls are the easiest to manipulate.] Someone had replied underneath: [Aren’t you afraid he’ll actually fall in love with her?] The original poster—OP—replied instantly. You could practically hear the smirk through the screen: [What is there to be afraid of? My puppy is obedient. He doesn’t even dare hold her hand without my permission.] [I decide the position. I decide the frequency. I write the script.] [And all it takes is one phone call from me. Doesn’t matter if he’s mid-climax; if I call, he comes home.] My spine locked. A cold shiver, unrelated to the AC, traced its way down my back. I thought of Cole. I thought of the half-dozen times he had abandoned me in the middle of a date, or even in bed, because of a “work emergency.” He never gave an explanation, just a frantic, apologetic look before rushing out the door. I didn’t want to believe it. My thumb hovered over the screen, trembling, but I scrolled down. [That little girl’s birthday is today. I told him he wasn’t allowed to go. He dropped to his knees and begged.] The attached photo showed a man kneeling on a hardwood floor, his head bowed in religious devotion, kissing the tip of a woman’s stiletto heel. Dangling from a silver chain around his neck, catching the light, was a ring. Our promise ring. 1 I opened the photo. Closed it. Zoomed in. Zoomed out. I did this five times, as if manipulating the pixels could rearrange reality into a misunderstanding. As if I could force it to be a coincidence. It’s just my anxiety, I told myself. I’m overthinking. But a voice in the back of my head, quiet and lethal, whispered: It’s all true. I felt unmoored. I couldn’t reconcile the Cole I knew—the man who tracked my cycle, who remembered to pick the cilantro out of my tacos because he knew I hated the taste, who dressed specifically to please my eye—with the submissive creature in that photo. I closed my eyes, forcing myself to breathe. My mind flashed back to a month ago. The weight of his hands as he slid the matching bands onto our fingers. “Next year,” he had said, his voice thick with emotion, “I’m taking you to meet my parents in Vermont. And then we’ll go see yours. I want to ask them properly. I want to be worthy of you.” He had sounded so reverent. So careful. My hands were shaking so badly I nearly dropped the phone. I kept scrolling, desperate for a discrepancy. A mole. A scar. Anything to prove it wasn’t him. The replies were piling up—envy, disgust, curiosity. But the OP, whose handle was LadyStarling, replied with the terrifying calm of a woman who holds the leash: [Why the jealousy? Hate the game, not the player. If you want to blame someone, blame the girl. She’s painfully naive. It’s pathetic.] [Valentine’s. Christmas. Her birthday. Unless I sign off on it, he doesn’t spend a single holiday with her.] [And the apologies? The ‘makeup gifts’? All my cast-offs. Purses I’m bored with. Freebies from events. Even those rings—they were made from the scrap metal of a custom piece I commissioned.] The further I read, the colder I got. My vision blurred, tears stinging the corners of my eyes. I wanted to stop, but I couldn’t. It was like picking at a scab—painful, but necessary. Everything she wrote aligned perfectly with the last three years of my life. Cole never spent holidays with me. We never celebrated our actual birthdays together. “Fiscal year-end,” he’d say. “Inventory audits.” “Client crisis.” But the next day, there was always a gift. “To make it up to you, Mayer,” he’d say. I didn’t know if the handbags were used. I didn’t know if the necklaces were freebies. But I knew about the ring. His ring had a delicate engraving on the inner band—a small bird in flight. Mine was a simple, thin band. Unadorned. It looked like something you could buy at a mall kiosk. I had asked him once why his had the bird and mine didn’t. “Swallows return home,” he had said, kissing my knuckles. “It represents my loyalty. I will always return to you.” Loyalty. To me? Or to her? My finger hovered over her username: LadyStarling. Her avatar was a sketch of a bird. Coincidence? No. I couldn’t lie to myself anymore. I clicked on her profile. It was curated, minimalist, expensive. No daily clutter. Just posts about her and her “insatiable” husband. The latest post was from two hours ago. [Year six. He proposed. Fireworks, hydrangeas, the exact ring I wanted. And, of course, the man I wanted.] The photo showed her back to the camera, holding a massive bouquet, locked in an embrace with a man. You could only see the back of the man’s head. But I knew the slope of those shoulders. I knew the way his hair curled slightly at the nape of his neck. It was Cole. I had spent three years staring at that back while he slept away from me. I ignored a tear that splashed onto the screen and kept scrolling. [Three days until our six-year anniversary. He replaced our bands. He engraved our names inside. She doesn’t suspect a thing.] Photo: A man’s hand, wearing the new ring. I remembered the day Cole gave me the rings. He had kissed the metal band on my finger. “From this moment on, Mayer. You and me. Unwavering.” Unwavering. Me and him? Or him and her? [The day after her birthday. I went with him to pick out the apology gift. Pearl earrings. They came free with my brooch.] I remembered that day perfectly. He had handed me the velvet box, kissing my forehead. “I’m so sorry, baby. The partners called an emergency meeting. I had to fly to Chicago.” “Don’t worry,” he’d said, looking me in the eye. “It won’t happen a second time.” It wouldn’t happen a second time. Because it was already the third time. I wiped the screen with my thumb, smearing the moisture. I scrolled back three years. To the very first post. [His drive is too much. I need a break. I picked out a subordinate from his firm. A sweet, stupid girl from the Midwest. I told her I was setting her up with a great guy. Funny thing is, she actually believed me.] A notification banner dropped down: LadyStarling just posted. I tapped it. [Sending him home now. He’ll walk through the door at exactly 12:00 AM. His first sentence will be: ‘I’m sorry, work got crazy, I didn’t mean to be late.’ his second move will be to kiss her forehead. Then he’ll give her the brooch I decided I didn’t like.] A horrific realization bloomed in my chest. The subway hadn’t even reached my stop, but I lurched forward, covering my mouth as I dry-heaved. A girl sitting next to me, noticing my distress, leaned in. “Miss? Are you okay?” I looked up. In her clear, concerned eyes, I saw my own reflection. Wretched. Broken. Three years. One thousand and ninety-five days. Thirty-six months. What I thought was a love story was a curated, scripted lie. I wasn’t a girlfriend. I was a pressure valve. To him, I wasn’t even a person. “I’m fine,” I whispered, accepting the tissue she offered. I wiped my face. Then, with a steadying breath, I screenshot every single post. Every comment. Every timestamp. The subway doors opened. I had missed my stop. I crossed the platform to catch the train going back. It was time to go home. 2 Cole walked through the door at midnight. 12:00:00. Not a minute early. Not a second late. Honestly, I had to hand it to this LadyStarling. She had trained her dog well. I was sitting in the living room in the dark. When he flipped the switch, flooding the room with light, he didn’t even flinch at the sight of me sitting on the sofa like a statue. He walked over, his expression the picture of exhausted regret. “I’m sorry, Mayer. Work got crazy. I didn’t mean to be late.” Then, he leaned down and kissed my forehead. Finally, he handed me a small gift bag. Every word. Every movement. Identical to the post. He was a robot executing a line of code. I took the bag. Inside was a brooch. It wasn’t new. The clasp had a microscopic scratch I recognized from one of LadyStarling’s high-res photos. A chill radiated from my bones outward. I looked up at Cole. My voice trembled, betraying me. “Was it really work?” Cole frowned, a micro-expression of confusion, as if the script had encountered an error. He didn’t know how to process a deviation from the routine. After a beat, he recovered. “Of course. I wouldn’t lie to you.” Wouldn’t lie to me? He hadn’t done anything but lie to me since the moment we met. He knelt—a comfortable position for him, apparently—and kissed my earlobe. “Mayer, trust me, okay? If you don’t trust me, it would kill me.” Kill you? How? Would you die in Blythe—LadyStarling’s—bed? Once, I thought Cole’s sweet nothings were poetry. Now, they sounded like a death sentence. I bit my lip, tasting iron, and said nothing. Cole stood up and ruffled my hair, dismissive and affectionate. “I promise, no next time. Don’t overthink it, okay?” Just then, his phone pinged. A specific, sharp chime. He froze. “I need a shower,” he muttered, turning away too quickly. He left his ring on the kitchen island—a habit he had when washing dishes or showering. The bathroom door clicked shut. I walked over to the island. I picked up the ring. Inside, the engraving was clear. C & B. Cole and Blythe. I assumed her name was Blythe. It fit the profile. Old money, sharp edges. The shower was running, but over the noise of the water, I heard the murmur of a voice. He wasn’t showering. He was checking in. The water stopped sooner than usual. Cole emerged, his hair completely dry. He walked over to me, pulling me into a hug that felt like a shroud. “I’m so sorry, Mayer. There’s an issue with the schematics. The partners need me back at the office now to fix the proposal.” He pulled away before I could answer, grabbing his keys, not even looking back. “Cole,” I called out. He paused at the entryway, one hand on the doorknob. “Do you have to go right now?” Maybe it was the tone of my voice—flat, dead—but his shoulders stiffened. He recovered quickly, though. He didn’t turn around. “Mayer, don’t make this hard for me, okay?” “I know I missed your birthday dinner, and I know you’re upset. But I can’t control the workload.” “Go to sleep. I’ll bring you those pistachio cronuts you love in the morning, okay?” I stood frozen in the center of the living room. I have a severe nut allergy. I don’t eat pistachios. I never have. The person who loves pistachios is LadyStarling. The last brick of the fantasy I had built crumbled. The door clicked shut. He was gone. He couldn’t wait to leave. I stood in the silence for a long time. Then, I grabbed my coat. 3 Cole didn’t take his car. He called a Lyft. I hailed a cab and told the driver to follow the grey sedan. We drove across the city, ending up in a neighborhood I couldn’t afford. He got out in front of The Hawthorne. I paid the driver and watched. Cole punched in the gate code without hesitation. Muscle memory. He was texting as he walked, head down, unaware of the ghost trailing him. I slipped through the gate before it closed behind him. I followed him into the lobby of Building 2. I watched the elevator numbers climb. It stopped at the 7th floor. The Hawthorne, Building 2, Floor 7. The name on the directory listed in the vestibule for 7A was B. Montgomery. Blythe Montgomery. My boss. My mentor. The woman who introduced me to Cole. The answer was so obvious it was insulting. I didn’t need any more proof. I touched my hand to my chest. Strange. Knowing for sure didn’t make it hurt more. It actually made the pain recede, replaced by a cold, heavy numbness. I closed my eyes, turned around, and walked away. 4 I didn’t sleep. I sat on my sofa as the sun bleached the sky from charcoal to gray. When the clock hit 7:00 AM, I sent a text to a contact I hadn’t spoken to in years. A rival firm. [Five hundred grand. I’ll give you the raw files for the Elysium Project.] The reply was instantaneous. [Surprising. I thought you said you’d never betray your mentor?] I ignored the jab. [Do you want them or not?] [Deal.] Cole didn’t come back that morning. I showered, dressed, and went to work. I sat at my desk for thirty minutes before Blythe Montgomery breezed in. She placed a paper bag on my desk, her smile warm, conspiratorial. “Ran into your boyfriend in the lobby. He asked me to bring this up to you.” The logo on the bag was from Le Rêve. The bakery where I usually ran errands to buy pistachio cronuts for Blythe. I didn’t take the bag. I just looked at her. Blythe’s smile didn’t falter, pristine and practiced. “What’s wrong? Trouble in paradise?” I lowered my gaze, staring at the grain of my desk. “I think Cole is cheating on me.” “He told me he was at the office last night. But I tracked his phone. He was at The Hawthorne.” I looked up, catching her eyes. “Blythe, I’ve been to your place to drop off files. Did you see him?” Her pause lasted exactly two seconds. Just long enough to calculate. “I went to bed early last night, Mayer.” “But don’t worry. If Cole is stepping out on you, I’ll handle him. I won’t let anyone treat you like that.” She squeezed my shoulder, her voice dripping with maternal concern. “You look terrible. Why don’t you take the day off?” I shook my head. “I’m fine.” Blythe went to her private bathroom. I waited a moment, then walked into her office with a stack of paperwork. There it was. On the corner of her mahogany desk, resting on a velvet tray. The ring. It was her habit. She told me once she always took her rings off before washing her hands; she was terrified they’d slip down the drain. I picked it up. Inside the band, the engraving mocked me. C & B. I snapped a photo. I walked out. Ten minutes later, LadyStarling posted again. [She seems to be getting suspicious. How do I kill the doubt? Hard to find a girl this stupid and useful. Can’t let her go yet.] [Maybe I’ll have him recreate my proposal for her. She’s a decent draftsman; her genes aren’t bad. I don’t want to ruin my body with pregnancy. Maybe I’ll let her have a kid for me.] The words were cold, sharp objects. I trusted this woman. When I was blacklisted from the industry for a plagiarism scandal I didn’t commit, Blythe was the only one who hired me. I was grateful. I gave her my loyalty. I gave her my designs, letting her put her name on my work because I thought she saved me. But she hadn’t saved me. She was just grooming me for the slaughter. 5 Suddenly, Cole became the perfect boyfriend. He stopped disappearing at midnight. He stopped leaving me on the curb for a phone call. He drove forty minutes to get the specific dim sum I liked. He bought me gifts that still had the price tags on them—new things. He hovered. But I didn’t feel loved. I felt sick. My stomach felt like it was full of wet wool. It was a nausea I couldn’t vomit up. LadyStarling updated: [Recreating my proposal at Point Dume. Everything is exactly what I like, except the ring. Cheap prop for a cheap girl.] Photo: Hydrangeas (Blythe’s favorite, not mine) and unlit fireworks. And, of course, the thin, plain band. Almost simultaneously, my phone buzzed. [Mayer, meet me at Point Dume. I have a surprise for you.] I went. Not for the surprise, but because I needed to end this farce with my own hands. I found him standing in the center of a circle of hydrangeas, holding a bouquet of pink lisianthus—a flower I hated. I stood ten feet away. I didn’t step into the circle. Cole didn’t seem to notice. He looked like an actor hitting his mark. He walked up to me, extending the flowers. “Mayer, will you make me the happiest man alive? Will you be my only one?” I didn’t reach for the flowers. Before silence could stretch into awkwardness, his phone rang. The special ringtone. His reflexes were Pavlovian. He answered it immediately. “Yes. Okay. I understand. Don’t cry. I’m coming.” He hung up, looking at me with those sad, puppy eyes. “Mayer, I’m so sorry. It’s the firm. Crisis.” “I have to go fix the schematics. I’ll call you, okay?” He didn’t wait for an answer. He turned and practically ran, clutching the lisianthus to his chest so they wouldn’t get crushed. He wasn’t protecting them because they were for me. He was protecting them because Blythe had paid for them. I realized then why Blythe was so confident he would never betray her. Because he truly loved her. He loved her enough to humiliate himself. He loved her enough to destroy me just to keep her entertained. LadyStarling posted: [Realized I couldn’t handle watching him propose to someone else. So I cried a little. He dropped everything and came running.] I didn’t watch him go. Calmly, I took out my phone. I logged into the company’s main social media account—Blythe had given me the passwords ages ago to manage her “brand.” I uploaded the thread I had been compiling for days. Then, I shut down the phone. I popped the SIM card out, snapped it in half, and tossed it into a trash can. I walked away. At that exact moment, on the massive digital billboard across from our office building—a billboard Blythe rented for client prestige—the scheduled ad loop was interrupted. Instead of architectural renderings, it began to cycle through screenshots. The “Dog” post. The kneeling photo. The matching rings. The timestamps proving Blythe Montgomery was LadyStarling. And one final slide: My original design files for the last three years of “Blythe Montgomery’s” award-winning work. When Cole rushed into Blythe’s apartment, she was sitting on the sofa, calmly eating a croissant. For no reason he could name, a wave of exhaustion hit him. He opened his mouth to speak, but both their phones began to ring. It was a mutual friend, voice high with panic. “Check your phones. Mayer knows. She knows everything.”

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My new laptop cost me twenty-five hundred dollars. It was a high-end beast, custom-specced for the kind of heavy rendering my job demands. When my nephew asked to borrow it to finish his senior capstone project, I didn’t even hesitate. I said yes. The next day, he posted on Instagram: “Just flipped this used rig for eight hundred bucks. Pure profit! Living my best life!” I clicked the photo. There it was. My laptop. The same specs, the same serial number sticker on the corner, the same custom finish. I didn’t call him. I didn’t scream. I simply pulled up my admin portal. After remotely bricking the hardware, I sent him a single text: “Are you finished with that project yet?” The comments section on his post was already starting to burn. 01 When the phone rang, I was deep in a flow state, eyes glued to a wall of cascading code. The caller ID read: Sarah. My older sister. I swiped to answer but didn’t get a word out before her voice blasted through the speaker, sharp and demanding. “Grant? You busy?” “A little,” I said, my eyes still tracking a bug in the script. “Listen, I need a favor. Tyler—you know he’s finishing his degree this semester—his laptop is a total piece of junk. It’s freezing up every time he tries to run his data models. He was wondering if he could borrow your new one for a bit.” My fingers froze over the keyboard. My new laptop. I’d bought it last month—a top-of-the-line machine that had eaten through a significant chunk of my savings. I needed the high-tier GPU for my rendering work; it wasn’t just a computer, it was my livelihood. “Sarah, I use that for work,” I said, trying to keep my voice level. “Ugh, I know you work. But he only needs it at night. You use it during the day, he uses it in the evening. It’s not a big deal. Besides, how long does it take to write a paper? A week, tops.” Her tone was so matter-of-fact, as if she were asking to borrow a stapler rather than a three-thousand-dollar setup. “We’re family, Grant. You’re his uncle. Don’t you want to see him succeed? If he doesn’t graduate because he can’t finish his project, how’s that going to look on all of us?” There it was. The “Family Tax.” I felt a familiar throb of irritation behind my eyes. I minimized my coding window and rubbed the bridge of my nose. “Sarah, the software and project files on that machine are sensitive. If he accidentally deletes—” “Oh, please. Just back it up. Tyler is twenty-two, not five. He knows how to use a computer. Just put your secret stuff in an encrypted folder and tell him not to touch it. It’s just a laptop, Grant. Don’t be so stingy.” I stayed silent. It was always the same routine. Whenever she wanted something, she draped herself in the mantle of “Family Values.” If I hesitated for even a second, I was the selfish one, the cold-hearted brother who didn’t care about blood. “Anyway, that apartment of yours isn’t exactly Fort Knox,” she added, her voice breezy now that she sensed my silence as a white flag. “It’s probably safer at our place anyway. We’re always home. It’s settled, then. I’ll have Tyler swing by later to pick it up.” In the background, I could hear Tyler’s muffled, impatient voice: “Mom, why are you still talking to him? He’s my uncle, he’s supposed to help me out.” The entitlement in his voice made my blood pressure spike. “Sarah, wait,” I said, my voice dropping an octave. “Now what?” “That machine is a tool, not a toy. If Tyler takes it, there are rules. One: he doesn’t touch my files. Two: if so much as a pixel is out of place, he pays for the repair or replacement. Three: I want it back in seven days. Exactly.” There was a beat of silence. Sarah clearly wasn’t used to me setting hard boundaries. “Fine, fine. Whatever. You’re so dramatic,” she huffed. “He’s on his way. Have it ready.” She hung up before I could say another word. I stared at the dead screen, a hollow feeling settling in my chest. I opened a folder and started backing up my active projects to the cloud, trying to convince myself I was just being paranoid. Tyler was a bit of a brat, sure, but he wouldn’t do anything truly stupid. He just needed to graduate. 02 Thirty minutes later, the doorbell buzzed. I opened it to find Tyler standing there, AirPods shoved in his ears, jaw working rhythmically on a piece of gum. He was wearing an oversized designer hoodie that probably cost more than my monthly grocery bill. He looked at me with an expression that bordered on bored contempt. “Hey. Mom said you’re letting me use the rig?” “Yeah.” I stepped aside to let him in. He wandered into my small apartment, his eyes scanning the space with a faint, judgmental smirk. He didn’t say a word about the decor, but the way he tilted his head told me he thought my place was beneath him. “Where’s the bag?” he asked. I pointed to the black, reinforced laptop case on the desk. I’d spent sixty bucks on that case specifically for its shock-absorption. He walked over and slung the strap over his shoulder with a reckless, one-handed motion. The bag swung and hit the edge of the desk with a dull thud. My heart did a painful somersault. “The password is 1-1-2-2-3-3,” I said, my voice tight. “There’s a folder on the desktop labeled ‘DO NOT TOUCH.’ Leave it alone. All the software you need for your data models is already installed and pinned to the taskbar.” “Got it, got it. Chill out,” he said, waving a hand dismissively. The music bleeding from his AirPods was so loud I could hear the bass line from three feet away. He turned to the door, stepping back into his sneakers without ever looking at me. “Later.” “Tyler,” I called out. He stopped, turning his head just enough to show he was annoyed. “What now?” “Be careful with it. Seriously. It’s expensive.” He let out a short, mocking laugh, the kind that implied I was an idiot for even stating the obvious. “Yeah, okay.” The door slammed shut behind him. I stood there in the silence, a bad taste lingering in my mouth. It didn’t feel like I’d just done a favor for a relative. It felt like I’d been shook down for protection money. I shook my head, trying to dislodge the anxiety. It’s just a week, I told myself. If I fight Sarah over this, Mom will be calling me tonight to give me a lecture on ‘harmony.’ I sat back down at my desk and realized how empty it looked. I usually ran a dual-monitor setup. Tyler hadn’t just taken the laptop; he’d taken the 27-inch 4K monitor too, unplugging it without even asking if it was part of the deal. I reached for my phone to call Sarah, then hesitated. I forced myself to take a deep breath. One week. Just survive one week. I hooked up my old, flickering backup monitor. As the screen hummed to life, I felt a strange, sinking sensation in my gut. 03 The next morning started with a frantic call from my project manager. We spent the entire morning in a remote sprint, trying to put out fires on a new client launch. By noon, I was exhausted. I ordered some takeout and, out of habit, opened Instagram to kill a few minutes while I waited for the delivery. I hadn’t scrolled three inches before a familiar handle popped up. It was Tyler. He’d posted a carousel of photos. The caption read: “Liquidating some assets. Flipped this used setup for $800. Pure profit! Thanks for the quick cash, boys. Drinks on me tonight!” My heart skipped a beat, then began to hammer against my ribs. I tapped the first photo. It was a screenshot of a Venmo notification. Someone had sent him $800 with the caption “For the laptop.” I swiped to the second photo. It was a picture of a sleek, black laptop. In the upper right corner was the tiny, silver logo sticker I’d put there so I wouldn’t mix it up with my old work machine. The third photo was a spec sheet of the hardware. CPU, GPU, RAM… everything matched my twenty-five hundred dollar investment perfectly. The fourth photo showed the laptop sitting next to the 4K monitor on a coffee table I recognized from Sarah’s living room. The blood rushed to my head so fast it made me dizzy. Then, just as quickly, it went cold. My hands were shaking. Fury. A cold, crystalline rage I hadn’t felt in years. I had lent him that machine yesterday. He had sold it today. A twenty-five hundred dollar laptop and a six-hundred dollar monitor—over three thousand dollars of professional equipment—sold for eight hundred bucks. And the bastard called it “pure profit.” I reached for the dial pad, ready to tear Sarah and Tyler apart. My thumb hovered over Sarah’s name, but I stopped. What would that accomplish? I knew exactly what she would say. “Oh, Grant, he’s just a kid, he didn’t know.” “He was short on rent, you’re his uncle, can’t you just help him out?” “It’s already sold, what do you want me to do? I’ll tell him to give you the eight hundred.” Eight hundred dollars for three thousand dollars worth of my life? I gripped the phone so hard my knuckles turned white. I scrolled down to the comments on Tyler’s post. “Bro, $800 for those specs? You robbed that guy,” one friend wrote. “Nice flip, Ty. We hitting the club tonight?” another chimed in. Tyler’s reply was a smug smiley face: “You know it. Table service at midnight.” I tossed the phone onto the desk and stood up, pacing the length of my tiny living room. My chest felt like it was being crushed by a lead weight. I couldn’t breathe. I walked to the window, lit a cigarette—a habit I’d quit a year ago—and took a long, harsh drag. The smoke burned my lungs and made me cough, but the nicotine hit my system and began to clear the fog of panic. I couldn’t just scream at them. They didn’t speak the language of logic or respect. To them, my hard work was just a resource for them to mine. I needed a better way. I needed a way to make Tyler cough up the hardware, and to make sure both he and his “smart” buyer regretted ever crossing me. My eyes fell on my desktop tower, still humming as it compiled code. A thought struck me like a lightning bolt. The laptop was a professional workstation. For security and insurance purposes, I had registered it through the manufacturer’s enterprise cloud service and bound the hardware ID to my account. That account gave me master-level permissions. Including… the “Nuclear Option.” 04 I crushed out the cigarette and sat back down. Stay cold, I told myself. Stay clinical. I opened my browser and navigated to the manufacturer’s portal. Login. Password. Two-factor authentication. The page loaded, showing my device management dashboard. A single line of text sat at the top of the list: “Model: Precision Series X. Serial: XXXXXXXXXXXX. Status: Online.” Online. That meant the buyer had already hooked it up to Wi-Fi. I stared at that green “Online” indicator, and a slow, jagged smile spread across my face. Perfect. I clicked on “Device Actions.” A menu of options appeared: Locate Device, Play Sound, Lock Hardware, Wipe Data. My cursor hovered over Lock Hardware. If I clicked this, a low-level command would be sent via the cloud directly to the laptop’s BIOS chip. It wasn’t just a Windows password lock. It would physically disable the motherboard, the CPU, and the SSD controller. The laptop would become a literal brick. No amount of reformatting or part-swapping would fix it. It would be a three-thousand-dollar paperweight. The only way to unlock it was for me—and only me—to send the authorization code from this specific account. It was a feature designed for corporate theft. I never thought I’d be using it on my own nephew. I began to map out the moves in my head. Step one: Lock the device. Turn that buyer’s “steal” into a piece of junk. When he realizes he’s been scammed, he’ll go straight for Tyler’s throat. Step two: Apply pressure. Tyler, desperate to keep the buyer from calling the cops or kicking his door in, would have to come crawling back to me. Step three: Recovery. I’d get my gear back, and Tyler would learn that actions have consequences. No screaming. No family drama on the phone. Just a clean, digital execution. I didn’t need to argue with people who didn’t value me. I just needed to show them what happens when you steal from a man who knows how the machine works.

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The year I turned twenty, I sold my body to my greatest enemy. I crawled into his bed and let him ruin me, all for the sake of a plea—that he’d show mercy and let my mother go. But mercy never came. My mother died anyway, crushed in a horrific multi-car pileup. By the time they pulled her from the wreckage, half of her head was gone. I remember storming into the boardroom, my body still aching and torn from him, screaming with a hysteria that rattled the glass walls. “Silas, I gave you everything you wanted! Why did you still kill her?” His response was a backhand so violent it sent me spinning to the floor. Silas didn’t even blink. He looked down at me, his eyes two chips of frozen Atlantic ice. “When my mother jumped from that balcony right in front of me, I wanted to ask ‘why,’ too,” he said, his voice terrifyingly calm. “Why was your mother such a pathetic whore? Why did she have to seduce my father? Why did she have to drive my mother to her death?” He leaned down, his shadow swallowing me whole. “June, the debt is only beginning to be paid. If you’re crying now, you’re far too early.” He forced me into a marriage license using the ninety-nine private photos he’d taken of me that first night as blackmail. Then, he turned around and made sure the entire city of Chicago watched as he dropped millions to woo his socialite childhood sweetheart. He forced me to hand-fold nine hundred and ninety-nine paper roses for her, until my fingertips were raw and bleeding. He forced me to deliver a box of condoms to their hotel in the middle of a torrential rainstorm, a night that left me with a fever so high it turned into a week-long stint in the ICU with pneumonia. Silas wanted me to watch him love someone else. He wanted me to witness the way he cherished her, pampered her, and adored her, until the sheer weight of the contrast made me want to claw my own heart out. What he didn’t know was that after six years of this mutual destruction, I was actually dying. And of those ninety-nine photos, only three remained. … I had been unconscious in the hospital for seven days after my last round of chemotherapy failed. I didn’t expect to find Silas waiting outside my cramped apartment the moment I was discharged. He didn’t greet me. He just grabbed me, slamming me against the door with a rage that vibrated through his grip. “June, Madeline asked you for those things. Why haven’t you given them to her?” he hissed. “Don’t think for a second I won’t leak those photos.” The photos. Those hazy, intimate, shameful captures of a night that should have never happened. If he leaked them, the world would see exactly what he called me: a whore. The familiar jolt of panic finally cleared the fog in my brain. I lifted my head with great effort, my voice a raspy whisper. “I’ll give them to her. What does she want?” I vaguely recalled Silas sending me a series of voice notes before I started chemo. But back then, every ounce of my soul had been focused on begging God for a chance to live. I hadn’t had the strength to listen to his demands. I pulled out my phone. The chat history was a graveyard of missed connections—hundreds of voice notes. I tapped one. The high-pitched, pampered lilt of Madeline filled the air, Silas’s voice murmuring in a low, soothing tone in the background. “Silas, why did you ever write her love letters? Why did you make her a custom snow globe? I want them. They’re mine now. Tell her to give them back!” She wanted the relics of our past. The matching sets—the gloves, the mugs, the pens. Back when Silas loved me most, everything had to be a pair. His and hers. Those memories felt like they belonged to a different century, a different girl. My eyes began to sting, but Silas caught my jaw in a bruising grip, forcing me to meet his mocking gaze. “What’s the matter, June? Can’t let go?” The last time I’d hesitated—when I refused to give Madeline my mother’s heirloom jade bracelet—Silas had arranged for my mother’s grave to be desecrated. If I hadn’t made it there in time, I wouldn’t even have been able to save her urn. I shook my head violently. “No! No, I’ll get them. I’ll give them to you right now.” I leaned against the doorframe, my legs shaking, and fumbled with the lock. Once inside, I began to scavenge through my life for his scraps. The voice notes continued to play in the background, a soundtrack to my humiliation. “Have those things at my office by 6 AM tomorrow.” “Where the hell are you?” “June, you’ve got balls ignoring me for this many days. Get out here!” Then, the final one: “Madeline and I are getting engaged tomorrow. If you don’t show up, you know the consequences.” Engaged? My heart skipped a beat, stuttering in my chest. The glass snow globe I was holding slipped through my numb fingers and shattered on the floor, rolling to a stop at Silas’s feet. He leaned over and picked it up, eyeing my ghostly pallor. “What? Did you think that because we have a piece of paper, I was still holding a candle for you? After six years?” He flipped the snow globe over. On the base, “S & J” was engraved in a youthful, hopeful script. He let out a sharp, derisive laugh. “You don’t deserve to have your name next to mine.” He grabbed an X-Acto knife from my desk and brutally gouged the letters out. The plastic shavings fell on me like grey snow. I bit my lip until I tasted copper. He was right. I didn’t deserve it. Everyone knew Silas hated me. To the world, our six-year marriage was a joke, and I was just a social climber who had trapped a king. No one knew I had been ready to sign the divorce papers years ago. I had even tried to end it all once—tried to leave this world entirely. But Silas had thrown those ninety-nine photos in my face. “You want to die, June? Go ahead,” he’d sneered. “And the second your heart stops, I’ll hit ‘send.’ I’ll let the world know the daughter is just like the mother. I’ll make sure your mother’s name is synonymous with ‘trash’ for eternity.” So I stayed. For my mother’s dignity, what little was left of it. For six years, we had a system: for every act of penance, for every time I let him degrade me, he deleted one photo. Now, there were only three left. He was getting married to the woman he actually loved. It was almost over. I packed the items into a bag with trembling hands and looked at him, my voice devoid of emotion. “What else do you want from me? To delete the last three?” Silas stared at me, then his gaze drifted to the framed photo of my mother on the wall. His expression curdled into something dark and ugly. A cold dread pooled in my stomach. I turned to run, but he caught my ankle and hauled me back onto the sofa. “Silas, stop! You’re crazy! My mother is right there!” I thrashed, pointing at the photo. He was brutal, his movements stripped of any lingering tenderness. “The daughter of a woman who crawled into her best friend’s husband’s bed doesn’t get to talk about dignity,” he spat. I stopped fighting. Suddenly, I was eighteen again. The day Silas told me he loved me. We were so happy, so young. And then we walked through the front door and saw my mother and his father together. I saw Silas’s mother on the balcony, her face a mask of white marble before she stepped into the air. Silas had screamed then—a sound of pure, jagged despair. The same sound he was making now with his body, trying to break me. I pulled a throw pillow over my face to blot out the world. “Fine, Silas. Do it. But it costs you two photos.” He stayed all night. When I tried to look away, he forced my head toward the wall. I strained my neck, watching the ceiling light flicker and sway. Across the room, the incense smoke curled in front of my mother’s picture, obscuring her face. I imagined she was smiling sadly at me. Years ago, I asked her why. Why Silas’s mother? If she hadn’t taken us in when we were homeless, we would have died in the snow. My mother had cried, telling me that Silas’s mother was dying of a hidden illness, and she was terrified we’d be thrown out on the street again. She did it out of survival. But after the suicide, Silas’s father had a heart attack and died. Creditors swarmed. Silas’s legs were broken by thugs who took the company. They made him crawl; they called him garbage. My mother realized her sin too late. She worked three jobs, sold her blood, sold a kidney, just to put Silas through school. I dropped out of college to wait tables and entertain clients, drinking myself sick so he wouldn’t have to. But Silas would just rub his legs—the ones that still ached on rainy nights—and look at me with bloodshot eyes. “My family is gone because of you. You think a few years of playing saint makes us even? You’re dreaming.” Once he took back his empire, he crushed everyone who had ever touched him. I was the only one left to bleed. I had tried to hate him back, but after my mother died, I investigated the accident. It really was just a car crash. I couldn’t even blame him for her death. Loving him was just too exhausting. By dawn, it was over. I was cold, aching in places I didn’t know could hurt, curled into a ball on the sofa. I drifted into a dream of that first snowy night his family took us in. He had cupped my face and told me not to cry. His hands were so warm. I woke up. The warmth was gone. Only the cold, drying tracks of tears remained. Silas was standing over me, his silhouette lost in the shadows. I reached out and grabbed his sleeve, my voice a ghost. “Two photos. Delete them.” He didn’t answer. He just turned and walked away. “Silas! Delete them! Do you hear me?” I tried to stand, but my legs gave out. I hit the floor face-first. Blood erupted from my nose. I wiped at it frantically, my vision blurring. “Delete them!” “You’re so desperate to protect that bitch’s memory?” his cold voice drifted back to me. “Fine. You want the last ones gone? Come to my engagement party tonight. Work as a server. Do that, and I’ll wipe the slate clean.” The word “cruel” echoed in my mind. Today would have been our tenth anniversary—from the day we first became “us.” But my body was running out of time. “Okay,” I whispered. When I arrived at the ballroom, Silas’s secretary shoved a uniform at me. When I stepped out, Silas was waiting. He stared at my face with a strange, unreadable expression. The fall had left a massive purple bruise across my cheek. I’d tried to cover it with powder, but the greyish-white over my sickly skin made me look like a corpse. I’d added blush in a panic, and now I looked like a Victorian ghost. I didn’t know what to do, so I just smiled. He tossed a piece of cake onto a tray. “You look like a freak. Eat that. I don’t need you fainting and making a scene.” The smell of the sugar made my stomach turn. I wanted to vomit, but he stood there, watching me until I forced every bite down. Only then did he leave. I drifted through the crowd, the room spinning. I needed to get to the bathroom. “June? I thought you’d have more pride than this.” It was Madeline. She swirled her champagne, leaning in close to my ear. “Silas still loves me. I’m the one who hired the guys to break his legs back then, and he’s still marrying me. You were the one who stayed by his side, and he wants you dead.” I froze. I had always thought Silas hated the people who ruined him. But when he took over, he brought Madeline back into the fold immediately. When I asked him why, he told me it was because Madeline was “smart.” She had betrayed her own father to help Silas at the very end. I was the one who wasn’t “smart.” The stomach acid was rising. I couldn’t breathe. “Move,” I managed. Madeline smirked, blocking my path with her voluminous skirt. “Don’t go yet. Look at my dress.” I lost it. I couldn’t hold it back anymore. I vomited, the liquid splashing right across the pristine white silk of her designer gown. “Oh god,” I gasped, reaching out to wipe it. “I’m sorry, I didn’t—” My vision tunneled. I grabbed for the nearest table to steady myself, but I only succeeded in dragging the tablecloth down with me. Glass shattered everywhere. A heavy hand grabbed my collar and yanked me back. “June! What did I tell you?” Silas roared. I tried to explain, but I just retched again. He looked at me with pure loathing, then turned to the sobbing Madeline. I looked at her dress again. I recognized the pattern. It was a sketch Silas had made for me when we were eighteen. He had told me then that he’d have a snowflake embroidered on the lapel of his suit to match me. I looked at his chest. There was the snowflake. Now covered in my filth. I reached out with trembling hands to clean it, but he shoved me away. “Your pathetic act isn’t working. You did this on purpose.” He pointed to the floor. “Clean it up. Use your hands.” I fell to my knees, the broken glass slicing into my palms. Silas led a crying Madeline away, and the guests followed, their faces twisted in disgust. The wedding march began to play in the distance. Or maybe it was close. I couldn’t tell. I don’t know how long I was on the floor. Eventually, a pair of polished shoes appeared in my field of vision. A toe lifted my chin. “June, do you regret it yet?” I looked up blindly. Regret what? Regret not abandoning my mother? Silas, that woman you hate so much… she raised me. She saved me from the man who tried to hurt me when I was a child. She gave me her last crust of bread when we were starving. What was I supposed to do? I didn’t answer. I was too tired. Suddenly, Madeline’s voice rang out from the other side of the room. “Is it true, Silas? The demolition for that slum redevelopment has started today?” My heart stopped. “Which slum?” I croaked. “Silas! Which neighborhood!” By the time I hailed a cab and got back, half the block was rubble. My mother’s ashes were in that apartment. The roar of the excavators was deafening. I ran toward the machines, trying to scream, trying to grab a foreman’s radio. Someone shoved me down. Blood and tears smeared across my face as I scrambled back up. “Stop! You can’t! I still live here! I haven’t moved my things!” A pair of leather shoes appeared. I looked up. It was Silas. He was supposed to be at his engagement party, but he was here, watching the destruction. I grabbed his pant leg. “Silas, please! You know my mother is in there. Please, just ten minutes. Let me go in and get her.” But his eyes were dead. I went still. The realization hit me like a physical blow. “You… you did this on purpose?” A project this big… he must have paid off the landlord not to notify me. He’d kept me in the hospital for seven days, then dragged me to the party today just to ensure I wasn’t here. He wanted to erase the last trace of her. “Why?” I whispered. Silas closed his eyes, his voice tight. “Today is also my mother’s anniversary, June. Do you know what your mother said to mine ten years ago? She said, ‘You’re dying anyway. He’s going to remarry. Why not me? I’m just getting a head start.’” “She was her best friend for thirty years. And she killed her. So why should I give your mother any dignity in death?” At that exact moment, a thunderous crash shook the ground. The three-story building collapsed into a heap of dust. Through the haze, I saw it. The framed photo of my mother, smashed under a concrete slab. The ceramic urn, shattered into a thousand pieces. Her ashes—the last physical remains of the woman who loved me—were scattered into the Chicago wind, mixing with the dirt. I didn’t want to cry. I had no tears left. But they came anyway. “But Silas… I thought I was paying for her sins?” I whispered. “We had a deal. Ninety-nine photos. Ninety-nine acts of penance. I gave you six years. Six years of hell. Wasn’t that enough?” I saw a flash of something like panic in his eyes. “Not enough,” he barked, his voice trembling. I snapped. I lunged at him, screaming. “It’s enough! It’s enough! I slept with you, I watched you marry her, I bled for you! Give me the phone! Delete the photos! I’m taking my mother and I’m leaving!” A sharp slap sent my head spinning. Silas looked like a stranger. His knuckles were white. He laughed, a jagged, broken sound. “You want to leave me that badly, June?” He shoved his phone in front of my face. There they were. All ninety-nine. Every shameful, private moment I had sacrificed my soul to delete. They were all back. “What is this? Why are they back?” His eyes were full of a manic, desperate kind of hate. “I’m giving you one last chance. Behave. We’ll replace the bride today. It’ll be you. We’ll spend the rest of our lives together.” “Or, you can keep paying the debt.” The images flickered on the screen—a slideshow of my humiliation reflecting in my wide, dead eyes. I started to laugh. I was a joke. The last six years were a punchline. “I don’t want either,” I said. Warm blood began to drip onto my wrist, splashing onto Silas’s white collar. He looked down, his face suddenly contorting into a mask of pure horror. But I couldn’t hear him anymore. The world was tilting. “Silas,” I whispered as I hit the ground. “I don’t want you.”

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I returned from a grueling business trip in the dead of night, only to find a complete stranger in my apartment. He was in nothing but a pair of low-slung gym shorts, mid-pushup in the center of my living room. His shoulders were broad, his waist tapered into that lethal V-line, and the deep groove of his spine looked sculpted. He was radiating heat, drenched in sweat, his skin glistening under the dim amber lamps. He looked like a surge of raw testosterone with nowhere to go. My flight-or-fight response short-circuited. Naturally, I chose “police.” I called 911 and had him hauled away in handcuffs. “In all my years, I never thought I’d be the one bailing someone out of a precinct at 2:00 AM!” My best friend, Maddie, was practically wailing as we stepped out of the station into the biting winter air. “Technically, you weren’t bailing me out.” The wind sliced through my parka. I didn’t stop walking toward the curb. “Gia, I’m the only one with your spare key! Couldn’t you have just texted me first?” she groaned, jogging to catch up. I pulled out my phone, opened Uber, and punched in my home address. Once the ride was confirmed, I turned to her with a sugary, dangerous smile. “And did you happen to ‘text me first’ before you rented out my guest room to a stranger?” “It was supposed to be a surprise…” Maddie gave me a playful, albeit guilty, wink. “You’ve been complaining for months that the mortgage on that two-bedroom is eating you alive. I thought I was helping.” “Surprise? Maddie, it was a horror movie intro.” I glanced over my shoulder. Standing a few feet behind her was the man in question. He was easily a head taller than me, possessing the kind of physical presence that felt like a localized weather system. If he had actually been a home intruder, I wouldn’t have stood a chance. Maddie looked at me, her expression a mix of pity and exasperation. “Gia, seriously. Have you lived alone so long that you’ve developed a full-blown persecution complex?” 1 “Have you ever seen that movie 3-Iron?” I asked, stopping at the edge of the sidewa She blinked, confused. “The Korean one? No, what’s it about?” “To summarize: it’s about a creep who breaks into people’s houses while they’re away. He lives in their space, eats their food, uses their shower, and sifts through their closets.” I tilted my chin up, looking past her at the man. “He sleeps in their bed, uses their mug, and stares at their photos. It’s a violation.” Maddie’s eyes went wide. “We live in a civilized society, Gia! People don’t just do that.” “Don’t they?” I gestured vaguely behind her. “Ask him. He’s the world traveler. He’s seen it all, hasn’t he?” Maddie turned slowly toward him. “Is that… a real thing? Do people do that?” “They do,” Brooks Miller said, nodding solemnly. He raised his right hand, a boyish, slightly mocking grin tugging at the corner of his mouth. “But I swear on my life, I’m not a ‘creep.’” “The jury’s still out on that,” I muttered. My Uber pulled up. I checked the plates and gave Maddie a curt wave. “I’m going home.” “Be nice to him!” Maddie hissed in my ear as she leaned in for a quick goodbye. “I picked him specifically based on your ‘type.’ He’s gorgeous, right? Consider him my late Christmas present to you.” My jaw tightened. I didn’t even know how to respond to that level of delusion. “Just go home, Maddie. I’ll call you if I’m murdered.” I climbed into the back seat, ready to sink into the upholstery. But before the door could click shut, the front passenger door swung open. Brooks slid inside like he owned the car. 2 “Get out,” I snapped. “We’re going to the same place.” He buckled his seatbelt with practiced ease. “And I’m paying for the ride.” I thought about my $4,000 monthly mortgage payment. I thought about the twenty-minute drive ahead. My pride wavered. Before I could protest further, the driver engaged the child locks and pulled out into traffic. “Lovers’ quarrel?” the driver chuckled, glancing at us through the rearview mirror. “It’s a cold night to be fighting, folks. The man apologized by paying for the ride; give him a break, sweetheart.” “He is not my boyfriend,” I said, my voice flat. “Sure, sure. I get it,” the driver said with a knowing wink. He clearly did not get it. But the heater was blasting, and the bone-deep exhaustion of a two-week business trip finally hit me. I didn’t have the energy to argue with a stranger about my non-existent love life. I closed my eyes and drifted. When we arrived, Brooks handled the payment without a word. Inside the lobby, the silence between us was heavy. I hung my coat in the entryway, feeling like a ghost in my own home, and stumbled toward the bathroom. “We need to talk,” Brooks said. His long stride easily cut me off. My reflexes were shot. I tried to stop, but my momentum carried me straight into his chest. As I started to lose my balance, his hand shot out, catching me firmly by the waist. The scent of him—something like cedarwood and cold rain—hit me instantly. I looked up, startled. I saw the sharp line of his jaw, the slight pulse in his throat, and then his eyes—deep, dark, and currently reflecting a very disheveled version of me. My heart did a sudden, traitorous trip-wire skip. “Sorry.” He let go immediately, stepping back to give me air. “It’s fine,” I said, waving a hand as if I could brush away the tension. “I’m just… I’m dead on my feet. Can this wait?” I had been traveling for fifteen days. I had spent the last three hours in a police station. I was done. “Fine.” A faint, almost tender smile touched his lips. “Get some sleep, Gia.” Tender? Was I so starved for affection that I was hallucinating subtext? I shook my head, walked into the bathroom, and locked the door. I scrubbed my face, took the fastest shower in history, and collapsed onto my pillows. I fell asleep instantly, only to dream of a warm, shirtless man holding me close. In the dream, I didn’t call the police. In the dream, I leaned in and kissed him. I was startled awake by a series of muffled thuds and high-pitched shouting from the unit next door. I checked my phone: 1:15 AM. The “Night Owls” were back. My neighbors were a couple who seemingly lived to argue and rearrange furniture between the hours of midnight and 4:00 AM. Even with my noise-canceling earplugs, the vibration of their voices bled through the drywall. Unable to get back to sleep, I wandered into the living room for a glass of water, only to nearly jump out of my skin when I saw a shadow on the couch. 3 “What are you doing out here?” I exhaled, my heart hammering. The remnants of that dream flashed in my mind, making my cheeks heat up in the dark. He held up a glass. “Still adjusting to the climate here. My throat’s like a desert.” “You’ll get used to it,” I said, heading for the kitchen. “By the way,” he gestured toward the wall shared with the neighbors. “Is this a regular thing, or a special occasion?” “How long have you been here?” I asked. He thought for a second. “Four days.” “And how many nights has it been quiet?” He went silent. The answer was zero. “They run some kind of wholesale business,” I explained, leaning against the counter with my lukewarm water. “They get home at 1:00 AM, screaming at each other, then they start cleaning and moving boxes until 4:00. I have spare earplugs if you want them.” He narrowed his eyes. “And you just… accept this?” “What choice do I have?” I looked around my beautiful, expensive prison. “I bought this place. I spent a fortune on the renovations. I’m locked into a thirty-year mortgage. You can’t just ‘not accept’ a neighbor in a high-rise.” I didn’t mention the other sounds they made—the ones that were even more awkward to overhear. Brooks frowned. “Have you called the cops?” “Of course. And the HOA, at least a dozen times.” I shrugged, feeling the familiar weight of helplessness. “It doesn’t matter. In a building with three hundred units, the management doesn’t care about one noisy couple.” His expression shifted into something unreadable. “Let me try.” He set his glass down and started for the door. “Wait—” I lunged forward, grabbing the hem of his shirt. Because of the angle, my eyes landed directly on his abs—perfectly defined, even in the shadows. I yanked my hand back like I’d touched a hot stove. “They aren’t… they aren’t nice people, Brooks.” He looked at me, waiting for more. “See that dent in the bottom of my door?” I whispered, my hand trembling slightly. “The husband did that. He kicked it because I asked them to keep it down once. They’re bullies.” Brooks’s eyes darkened. “Stay inside. Don’t come out until I’m back.” He reached out and briefly, gently, ruffled my hair. Before I could process the “head pat” or the weirdly protective surge it gave me, he was out the door. 4 Brooks knocked on their door. Not a frantic pounding, but a steady, rhythmic, polite thrum. The muffled shouting inside continued, ignoring him. Brooks didn’t lose his temper. He just kept knocking. Three beats, a pause. Three beats, a pause. It was relentless. “It’s the middle of the night! What the hell do you want?” The neighbor’s door flew open. I knew that man—he was a wall of aggressive muscle with a temper like a live wire. Panic flared in my chest. I grabbed the baseball bat I kept under my bed and crept toward my front door, ready to intervene. “Hey, man. I’m the guy from next door,” Brooks said. His voice was incredibly calm, almost conversational. “You the owner of this unit?” “Yeah—so what?” the neighbor barked. “Look, I get it,” Brooks said smoothly. “You and the wife work hard. Long hours, late nights. It’s a grind, and I respect that.” I blinked. What was he doing? “But here’s the thing,” Brooks continued, his tone softening but gaining a razor-sharp edge. “We’re corporate types. We need our sleep to keep the paychecks coming. Any chance you could dial the volume down a bit?” “I pay my taxes! I can talk however I want in my own damn house!” the man yelled. I could hear his wife chiming in with some choice insults from the background. “You absolutely have the right to speak,” Brooks agreed. “But rights have limits. Between 10:00 PM and 6:00 AM, anything over forty-five decibels is a city ordinance violation. I can call the precinct—the one I was just at tonight, actually. I’m on a first-name basis with the sergeant.” “Call ’em! I don’t give a damn about the cops!” “I figured you might say that,” Brooks said, his voice dropping an octave. “But you’re a business owner, right? Public records make it very easy to find your LLC and your tax filings. If the cops don’t work, I’ll just go through the City Council and the Better Business Bureau. I’ll make sure there’s a formal noise and nuisance investigation tied to your business address. Constant city inspections are a real pain for wholesale operations, aren’t they?” There was a long, pregnant silence. “Listen, man… let’s not get crazy,” the neighbor muttered, his bravado springing a leak. “I’m not being crazy. I’m being neighborly,” Brooks replied cheerfully. “I’d hate to see your reputation suffer over something as simple as a loud conversation. So, are we good? Or do I need to start filing paperwork?” “We’re good. We’ll keep it down,” the neighbor grumbled. The door slammed shut. I leaned against my door, exhaling a breath I didn’t know I was holding. For years, I had lived in fear of that man’s temper. Brooks had dismantled him in three minutes with nothing but a calm voice and a subtle threat to his wallet. For the first time since moving in, I felt safe. Truly safe. I looked at the door. Maddie’s “gift” was looking better by the second. Now I just had to figure out how to handle him.

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The notification hit my phone like a dopamine spike: a wire transfer of ten thousand dollars from my husband’s company finance department. My heart leaped. A bonus? Finally? After the year we’d had, this was salvation. Then the phone rang. It was the finance manager, a woman whose voice usually carried the friction of sandpaper. “That transfer was a mistake,” she barked, skipping the pleasantries. “It’s for the partner, not you. Send it back. Now.” I froze, phone pressed to my ear, confusion clouding my brain. “Excuse me?” She mistook my hesitation for resistance. Her tone sharpened. “Listen, if you don’t return it, and the actual wife finds out, you’re going to be in a world of pain.” The room seemed to tilt. My husband, Russell? The man known throughout our neighborhood as the patron saint of family values? The man who listed my bank account for his direct deposit because he ‘didn’t trust himself with money’? Every month, like clockwork, three thousand dollars hit my account. Every penny of his salary. I forced my voice to remain steady, though my hand was trembling. “Does he… does he send her ten thousand every month?” The finance manager scoffed, a sound dripping with disdain. “Yes. And honestly? As the mistress, you should be grateful for your three grand allowance. Don’t try to compete with the wife.” The air left my lungs. “How long?” I whispered. “How long has he been paying her?” “Seven years,” she snapped, her patience evaporating. “Now, wire the money back.” I felt the cut deep in my gut, severing reality from fiction. My devoted, frugal husband had been funding a second, luxurious life. And apparently, to the world, I was the other woman. “I’ll handle it,” I managed to choke out. “Thank you.” 1 The finance manager hung up, relieved, assuming I was a compliant side-piece who knew her place. I walked out into the biting November wind, heading toward the office building where Russell had worked for seven years. My body felt numb, like I’d been submerged in ice water. I replayed the last fifteen years of our marriage, hunting for the cracks, the missed clues. But there were none. No late nights. No unexplained absences. Even at 2:00 AM, he was always in our bed. This was a man who saved cardboard boxes from deliveries to resell for pennies. A man who wore his boxer briefs until the fabric disintegrated, stitching them up rather than spending five dollars on a new pack. How could that man spend ten thousand dollars a month on a mistress? It wasn’t just him. Our entire family lived in a state of carefully curated poverty. His three-thousand-dollar salary. One thousand for his mother’s medical bills. Five hundred for rent in this crumbling apartment complex. I gave him two hundred for pocket money and five hundred for gas. That left eight hundred dollars. Eight hundred dollars to feed a family of four, pay utilities, and keep our daughter in school supplies. We bought vegetables at the grocery store minutes before closing to get the discounted, bruised produce. We lived in the cheapest unit in the worst part of town. We split pennies. We survived. He quit smoking to save money. He drove Uber after work until his eyes were red-rimmed with fatigue. To our neighbors, we were the gold standard of hardworking, blue-collar struggle. It was all a lie. A performance art piece. I entered the lobby of his office building. The receptionist, a bright-eyed girl no older than twenty, smiled professionally. “Can I help you?” “I’m looking for Russell,” I said. “Russell Davis.” “Do you have an appointment with Mr. Davis?” My stomach turned. The finance woman had called him Mr. Davis. Not Russell from accounting. Mr. Davis. “Just tell him Meredith is here.” The girl’s smile didn’t falter. “I’m sorry, ma’am, but the owner is out of the office right now. Perhaps you could call his cell?” Owner. The word echoed like a gunshot. Russell didn’t work here. He owned this place. And for seven years, I had been completely blind. 2 I swallowed the scream building in my throat and glanced past the receptionist. It was a boutique operation, maybe thirty employees, sleek modern furniture. Not a Fortune 500, but definitely not the warehouse job he claimed to have. There was a small coffee shop downstairs. I bought a four-dollar lemonade and sat by the window. Normally, that four dollars would have haunted me for days. That was a dinner for my family. That was two pairs of socks for my daughter, Hallie. That was a treat she’d beg for but I’d have to deny. I took a sip. It was sour, stinging my tongue. With shaking fingers, I downloaded a business registry app and typed in Russell’s name. There it was. Russell Davis. CEO. Founder. Board Member. Registered seven years ago. Capital: $200,000. E-commerce. I remembered that year. He had come home, lifting me off the ground, spinning me around until we were both dizzy. “Babe, I got a job! Three thousand a month! We’re going to be okay!” I believed him. God, I believed him. Back then, we were both nobodies. I was stocking shelves; he was inventory management. We fell in love in the breakroom of a logistics center. When Hallie was born, his mother’s health collapsed. I quit my job to care for the baby and the invalid. I ran the house. I nursed his mother through strokes and bedsores. When my back ached so bad I couldn’t stand, Russell would massage my shoulders, whispering, “I’m sorry, Meredith. I know it’s hard. Thank you.” The irony tasted like bile. When my lemonade was half gone, a sleek black SUV pulled up to the curb. Russell stepped out. He wasn’t wearing the faded, stained sweatpants he’d left the house in this morning. He was in a tailored charcoal suit that fit him perfectly. He walked around the car and opened the passenger door. A woman stepped out. High heels. A dress that hugged curves I hadn’t possessed in a decade. Glossy black hair, porcelain skin. She couldn’t have been more than twenty-five. Russell took her hand, interlacing their fingers, and led her into the building. My heart didn’t break; it shattered. It felt like my chest was caving in. I had imagined this scene a thousand times in nightmares—storming in, screaming, tearing his reputation to shreds. But in reality? I just felt… empty. My phone buzzed. A text from Hallie. Mom, where are you? I’m starving. The tears finally came, hot and fast, splashing onto my cracked phone screen. My daughter. Hallie was in middle school. She didn’t buy lunch; I made it every morning. I picked her up every night at 9:30 PM after her extracurriculars because we couldn’t afford the bus fare. Her father wouldn’t spend five dollars on her lunch, but he was spending ten thousand a month on this woman. I took a deep breath, wiping my face with my rough sleeve. I opened Uber Eats and ordered ribs, fries, and a salad to be delivered to Hallie’s school. The internet was right: If you don’t spend your husband’s money, someone else will. I waited. I waited until Russell and the woman came out. I followed their SUV in a cab, my heart hammering a frantic rhythm against my ribs. They drove to a gated community in the suburbs—the kind of place with manicured lawns and HOA fees higher than my rent. Thirty minutes later, they emerged. But there was a third person. A boy. Maybe six years old. I watched through the tint of the taxi window as the boy ran to Russell, shouting, “Daddy!” He had a son. The boy looked exactly like him. The eyes, the chin. It was a dagger twisting in my open wound. 3 When I gave birth to Hallie, I almost died. An amniotic fluid embolism. It was chaos. Russell had been a wreck. The nurses told me later that he fell to his knees in the hallway, sobbing, begging the doctors. “Save my wife. I don’t care about the baby. Just save Meredith. I’ll sell everything. Just save her.” He wasn’t a religious man, but that night he prayed to every god he could name. When I survived, he held me for hours, weeping. “No more,” he had whispered into my hair. “One daughter is enough. I’m never putting you through that again.” Even when his father threatened to disown him for not producing a male heir, Russell flipped the table. He cut ties with his dad to protect me. “Nothing matters more than Meredith’s life,” he told his relatives. Everyone said I was lucky. Everyone said Russell was a saint. It was all a joke. He didn’t stop having kids because he loved me. He stopped because he was having his son with someone else. I followed them to a high-end steakhouse. From a distance, I watched him order—filet mignon, lobster, expensive wine. I watched him cut the meat for the boy, wiping the kid’s mouth with a tenderness that made me sick. Last month, Hallie had asked, “Dad, can I go to the hibachi place with my friends? It’s twenty dollars.” He had looked at her sternly. “If you get straight A’s this semester, maybe.” Hallie was a B-student. He knew she wouldn’t get the money. Rage, cold and sharp, replaced my sorrow. I pulled out my phone and texted Grant, my nephew. He was a lawyer, sharp as a whip. I sent him everything. The location. The photos. The company details. Grant: Aunt Meredith, stay calm. Do not confront him yet. Let me dig. We need undeniable proof. I left the restaurant and went to pick up Hallie. I didn’t have a car. I drove a rusty 2004 sedan with no heater that sounded like a lawnmower. The wind cut right through the door seals. Hallie hopped in, shivering but beaming. “Mom! Did you win the lottery? That food was amazing!” I forced a smile, looking at her innocent face in the rearview mirror. “Something like that. I won fifty bucks on a scratch-off. I saved the rest so we can go get dinner together later.” “Really?” Her eyes widened. “Can we go to that hibachi place? I want you to try it.” 4 When we got home, Russell wasn’t there yet. My mother-in-law, Barbara, was in her room, shouting. “Where have you been? I’m starving in here! Useless…” Hallie sighed. “I’m hungry too, Mom.” I went to the kitchen. I boiled water for pasta. Simple. Cheap. Russell walked in just as I was draining the noodles. He was back in his costume—the faded hoodie and stained jeans. “Dinner’s ready,” I said, my voice flat. He patted his stomach, grimacing. “I grabbed a slice of pizza while I was driving Uber. My stomach’s acting up. I’m just going to crash.” He always did this. ‘I ate a cheap hot dog, my stomach hurts.’ It was his excuse to avoid eating our meager food. I used to worry about his nutrition. Now I knew he was just full of lobster. “Take a bowl to your mom first,” I said. He smiled, that boyish, charming smile. “You’re such a good wife, Meredith.” The words felt like a slap. He went into Barbara’s room. I walked past the door a moment later and heard whispering. “You’re a big shot boss now, Russell,” Barbara hissed. “Get me a nurse. What good is she? She can’t even give you a son. Thank god I have my grandson. When are you going to put him on the family tree? I can’t face your father in the afterlife like this.” My blood froze. She knew. The old witch knew everything. I was the only one playing the fool. Later, in bed, Russell turned to me. “Babe, I found a gig for you. My friend needs a housekeeper for his parents. Cooking, cleaning. Two grand a month.” I stared at him in the dark. “A housekeeper?” “It’s easy money,” he said. The next day, he drove me to the address. It was a nice condo. As we walked in, I saw a framed photo on the mantel. It was the mistress. Kinsley. And her parents. He wanted me to clean his mistress’s parents’ house. I turned to him, my voice trembling with a mixture of rage and disbelief. “Is that what I am to you? A servant? I’m supposed to scrub their toilets?” He looked panic-stricken for a split second, then recovered. “Meredith, don’t be like that. It’s just a job…” I walked out. That night, while he slept, I unlocked his phone. My hands shook as I scrolled. The things I found… It wasn’t just infidelity. It was criminal. Grant sent me a file the next morning. This is it, Auntie. It’s over. I saw the calendar notification on Russell’s phone: Company Gala. The Grand Hotel. I made my decision. The next morning, Russell left in his rags. I followed him. I waited until the gala was in full swing. I waited until he was on stage, holding Kinsley’s hand, soaking in the applause as the “power couple” of the year. I dialed 911. Then I called the FBI tip line number Grant had given me. As the sirens wailed outside the hotel, police officers and agents marched into the ballroom. They approached the stage. “Russell Davis?” an officer asked, handcuffs glinting under the chandelier. Russell looked confused. “Yes?” “We have a warrant for your arrest regarding multiple counts of wire fraud and human trafficking schemes. You have the right to remain silent.” Russell’s face went white. He looked out into the crowd, searching for an ally, and his eyes landed on me. I was walking down the center aisle, slow and steady.

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I found the letter while I was packing away my wife’s life. The letter said: Be careful of your daughter! … 1 Madeline had been an author, writing popular historical non-fiction, and her study was her sanctuary. She had never been one for organization; her creative process was a sprawling, chaotic mess. Her publisher had called earlier that week. Before she died, Madeline had been working on a new manuscript. They were hoping I could gather her notes, piece the drafts together, and allow them to publish it posthumously as her final work. Even in an age ruled by screens and keyboards, Madeline had fiercely clung to the habit of writing by hand. I spent hours drowning in the quiet dust of her study, sifting through loose pages scattered across her desk, trying to compile the fragments of her mind. I was nearly finished when I found it. Tucked behind the massive wall of bookshelves was a small, false panel. A hidden compartment. And inside, resting in the dark, was a single envelope. The recipient’s name was scrawled across the front. It was Madeline’s name. But the handwriting was jarring. It was frantic, jagged, radiating a kind of feral, manic energy. The pen had been pressed so hard into the paper that the nib had sliced right through the fibers, sharp as a knife blade. It was the kind of handwriting that burned itself into your retinas after a single glance. And over the ten years of our marriage, I had accidentally seen it more than once. Because it was her handwriting. Or, more accurately, it was the other her. Shortly after we were married, Madeline was diagnosed with severe Dissociative Identity Disorder. Her mind was a pendulum swinging between extremes—sometimes she was the gentle, deeply intelligent woman I married; other times, she was a chaotic, violent storm. What baffled her psychiatrists was the power dynamic of her psyche. Unlike most DID patients, Madeline’s “secondary” personality occupied her body for the vast majority of her life. She was emotionally stable, grounded, and entirely functional. She was the one who fell in love with me. She was the one who lived. Conversely, her “primary” personality—the original owner of her mind—was an absolute madwoman whenever she managed to claw her way to the surface. She was paranoid, aggressively neurotic, and harbored a terrifyingly strong drive for self-destruction. When the doctors finally explained the architecture of her mind, a cold horror washed over me. I realized that the woman I loved with all my heart, the tender and brilliant writer, was, in a clinical sense, a symptom. She was the secondary construct. Essentially, I was deeply in love with a psychological anomaly that wasn’t supposed to exist. The revelation terrified me. For a long time, I could barely look at her without a shiver of existential dread. But eventually, love won out. My devotion to her smothered my darkest doubts. Besides, I almost never saw her primary personality. Madeline was sick, yes, but she was also the strongest woman I had ever known. Even during her pregnancy, when her body and mind were pushed to the absolute breaking point, she kept the madwoman firmly locked away in the basement of her psyche. Until last month. When, without any warning, she opened the window of this very study, twenty-four stories above the city streets, and jumped. 2 Holding that strange, violent letter in my hands, I hesitated. The twisted handwriting belonged to the primary personality—the madwoman. It felt like a venomous curse, radiating a darkness that told my instincts to throw it away unread. Right then, my phone alarm buzzed. Five o’clock. Time to pick up our daughter, Hazel, from school. Ever since Madeline’s sudden death, our usually vibrant, sun-soaked seven-year-old had retreated into a chilling, hollow silence. Sometimes she would just sit there, staring at me for agonizingly long stretches without blinking. There were moments when I looked at her and genuinely wondered if she had become entirely unstuck from time. She no longer looked at the world with a child’s sprawling curiosity. Instead, she wore an armor of profound apathy. It made her look terribly out of place among the loud, messy joy of the other second graders. I told myself it was grief. A child’s mind short-circuiting under the crushing weight of a mother’s sudden absence. But today, Hazel was even more alarming. Her teacher pulled me aside at pickup, her face pale. Hazel had gotten into a physical altercation with a little boy in her class. The trigger? He had opened her pencil case without permission. In the principal’s office, the boy’s mother was holding her sobbing son. I glanced over. The boy’s face was bandaged. A bite wound. The mother was furious, screaming threats of lawsuits. Ultimately, with the principal playing referee, I paid her a substantial sum to settle the matter quietly. Throughout the entire screaming match, Hazel sat in the corner of the office like a discarded marionette. She didn’t cry. She didn’t throw a tantrum. She didn’t even flinch when the other mother shrieked. It was as if her soul had simply left the room, leaving behind an empty, breathing shell. Her doctors had warned me. Psychiatric conditions carry a heavy genetic weight. But I stubbornly clung to the narrative of grief. She was just a little girl who missed her mom. I just needed to be there for her. I needed to try harder. Later that night, after Hazel finally fell asleep, I sat at Madeline’s desk and stared at the envelope. I am not a man who can easily live with mysteries. That chaotic, aggressive handwriting had a vice grip on my chest. Madeline’s death had been so violently abrupt. That morning, we had been casually arguing over whether to sign Hazel up for ballet or piano. By that afternoon, the police were handing me her wedding ring in a plastic evidence bag. Ever since she died, I carried this suffocating sense of unreality. A part of me still felt like she hadn’t truly left. I needed to know what had happened to her in those final, desperate days. I lit a cigarette in the study—a habit she used to hate—and, with trembling fingers, tore the letter open. The manic handwriting was incredibly difficult to decipher, but I forced myself to read every word. By the time I finished, the shock had paralyzed me so completely that I didn’t move until the burning ash of the cigarette fell directly onto my bare hand. 3 The letter read: I finally understand it all! You are a coward! You couldn’t face your own fate as a human being, so you locked me away in my own mind! But running is useless. Even if you refuse to admit it, destiny is going to deliver a fatal blow when the hour strikes! You cannot hide. You cannot fight it! The further you run now, the more agonizing it will be when the day of reckoning arrives! Do you still want to run? Fine. Let me jog your memory. Let me remind you exactly what kind of fate you are so terrified of! The year you hijacked my body, I was barely thirteen years old. My poor mother was already driven completely insane by you. Just to survive, without a single ounce of pity, you institutionalized her. You are terrified of anyone getting close to you. What are you so afraid of? You’re afraid your filthy secret will be exposed! You knew how many people in this world loved me, so you destroyed them all to isolate yourself. My family, my friends, the boy I had a crush on—you hurt them, one by one, until everyone who cared for me was gone. Only then were you satisfied. Only then could you sleep at night. I finally know what you are! You are a dog, sprinting blindly with your tail between your legs! You are a demon crawling out from the bowels of hell! With so much blood on your hands, so many corpses piled beneath your feet, how dare you dream of a peaceful night’s sleep?! Did you think I would break like my mother? Did you think that because you’ve driven so many others mad, everyone will eventually bow to your will? Never! Not with me. You will never get what you want. You stole my life, my world, everything I ever owned, and now you want to kill me? I won’t let you have it! I know what you are now. I know how you exist. Which means you are going to die by my hands. I will end your endless running. My hands are shaking. I can feel you fighting me. You are fighting my presence so hard—are you finally scared? After driving so many minds to the brink, you’ve finally met a madwoman willing to drag you to hell with her. I know the bloodline has already been passed down. So there is only one way to kill you permanently. You hid your little secret in your daughter’s pencil case. That candle… I can barely hold the pen. Or is it you who is shaking? Are you terrified? I found your greatest secret. I can end you at any second. I can’t grip the pen anymore. This is my body, but you, you monster, have occupied it for far too long. You coward! You goddamn coward! My limbs felt like lead. It wasn’t until the searing sting of the cigarette ash hit my skin that the blood trapped in my chest finally flushed back into my veins. The letter was undated, but looking at the fading ink and the wear on the paper, it was years old. The madwoman inside my wife’s head had written a death threat. To my wife. A suffocating unease began to slither through my gut, like a rusted nail driven deep into my flesh, stopping the circulation. Moved by an entirely irrational terror, I walked down the hall to Hazel’s room. The soft glow of her nightlight spilled over the foot of her bed. She was clutching her stuffed bear, the tracks of dried tears still visible on her cheeks. But she was breathing evenly. Deeply asleep. On the desk beside her bed was her backpack. Inside was the pencil case—the one the boy had tried to open today. The madwoman’s letter claimed my wife’s deepest secret was hidden inside. A candle… Madeline had bought that pencil case for Hazel’s first day of school. She had lovingly covered it in cartoon stickers of Hazel’s favorite characters. As I pulled it from the bag, confronting this terrifying unknown, my hands shook violently. I unzipped it. Lying there quietly, buried under a pile of glitter pens and erasers, was a single candle. At first glance, it looked ordinary, but a closer look revealed something unsettling. It was impossibly old. The wax was heavily carved with intricate, esoteric patterns, but the material was severely dehydrated and cracked, resembling the deeply lined, ancient skin of a mummified face. It was the color of decaying parchment. It seemed like just a piece of antique wax. Its only crime was looking entirely out of place in a child’s school box. Needing to understand, I pulled my lighter from my pocket, intending to light the wick to see what would happen. But the moment the metallic clack of the lighter echoed in the quiet room, Hazel’s eyes snapped open. She let out a blood-curdling shriek, launching herself across the bed and violently snatching the candle out of my hands. She scrambled backward, wrapping her blankets tightly around herself, pressing into the far corner of her bed. She cradled the candle against her chest like a lifeline. I stepped forward, holding my hands up, trying to soothe her. But she bared her teeth and pressed further into the wall. When I looked into her eyes, a cold sweat broke out across the back of my neck. Her eyes were entirely bloodshot. And she was glaring at me with the pure, unadulterated malice of a cornered predator, looking as though she was calculating the exact moment to lunge and tear my throat out. Is she really my daughter?

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The wine stain bloomed across Gavin’s crisp white dress shirt like a fresh, jagged wound. It happened in slow motion—the stumble, the splash, the collective gasp of the entire marketing department. Gavin excused himself to the restroom to clean up, leaving a vacuum of silence that was instantly filled with frantic whispering. Everyone was placing bets on whether he’d explode. “I bet three rounds of shots he loses it,” one colleague hissed, leaning over the table. “Remember the intern who spilled coffee on his files? She was packing her box the next morning.” “I wouldn’t be so sure,” another chimed in, eyebrows raised. “Didn’t you hear? That’s Felicity. She’s the boss’s one that got away.” A sharp intake of breath swept through the group. The gossip continued, voice dropping to a conspiratorial murmur. “They say they only broke up because she moved to Paris after graduation. But look who’s back. And look where Gavin is now. Why do you think he took this job?” “Exactly. He’s been waiting for her. Give it a week, and they’ll be the power couple of the year.” Beside me, a coworker nudged my elbow, nearly knocking over my water. “Norah, didn’t you go to the same university as them? Come on, spill the tea. Was their love story really as epic as everyone says?” “Yeah, tell us! Why did they break up?” I sat there, my hand in my pocket, fingers curling around the cold, hard metal of a wedding band I had taken off five minutes ago. I’ve been secretly married to Gavin for a year. 1 The excitement in their eyes was palpable, a spotlight I didn’t want. They were waiting for me to narrate the legendary romance between the icy genius and the campus queen. I sat in the darkest corner of the private booth, usually content to be part of the wallpaper. But now, with a dozen pairs of eyes on me, the air felt thin. Just as I opened my mouth to deflect, the door swung open. Felicity breezed in, Gavin’s suit jacket draped casually over her arm like a trophy. “Gavin said not to wait for him,” she announced, her smile dazzling enough to light up the dim room. “He wants us to keep the party going.” She hadn’t changed a bit since college. The moment she entered a room, she owned it. My colleagues exchanged looks that screamed I told you so. The intimacy of using his first name, the jacket—it was all the confirmation they needed. Gavin and Felicity. Even their names sounded like a title on a bestseller list. One of the bolder guys, fueled by liquid courage, called out, “So, Felicity, give us the scoop. Is there still a spark between you and the boss?” Felicity didn’t look surprised. She blinked playfully, a practiced gesture. “Oh, that’s ancient history. Gavin forbid me from talking about it.” The table erupted in knowing “Ooooohs.” She feigned shyness, tucking a strand of hair behind her ear. ” seriously, don’t bring it up in front of him. He’s got thin skin about these things. I don’t want him getting mad at me later.” The teasing grew louder. She hadn’t confirmed anything, yet she’d confirmed everything. When Gavin finally returned, the wine stain faded but still visible, the conversation died down. No one dared question him directly, but the atmosphere was charged. Eyes darted between him and Felicity like spectators at a tennis match. People kept dropping buzzwords into the conversation—”first love,” “regret,” “youth.” The ring in my pocket had a sharp edge. It dug into my thigh through the thin fabric of my dress, a physical anchor to a reality that felt increasingly like a dream. My gaze drifted to Gavin’s left hand. It was bare. On the day we picked up our marriage license, his mother had given us matching bands. Gavin had looked at it, polite but distant, and said he wasn’t in the habit of wearing jewelry. His ring was currently gathering dust in a drawer in his study. I regretted coming tonight. Gavin sat there, a statue of ice, radiating his usual “do not approach” aura. He only spoke once, when Felicity, flushed with wine, started to sway in her seat. “Let’s call it a night,” he said. His voice was low, final. When the boss speaks, people move. Chairs scraped against the floor as everyone scrambled to organize rides. Someone pushed Felicity slightly toward Gavin. “Boss, Felicity’s pretty wasted. It’s not safe for her to take a cab alone. Can you drop her off?” Gavin’s eyes lifted, locking onto mine across the room. Before I could breathe, Felicity stumbled, her heels giving way, and she collapsed softly into his chest. I turned around and walked out the door. I practically ran. Behind me, I heard his voice, muffled by the distance. “Give me her address.” I hailed a cab alone. The city lights blurred as we drove, rain streaking the windows. Back at the apartment—our apartment—I filled the bathtub until the water was scalding. I submerged myself, letting the heat seep into my bones, and finally, the tears I’d been holding back all night broke free. Pathetic, I told myself. What right do you have to be aggrieved? He was the moon—distant, cold, beautiful. I was lucky enough to have claimed the moon for a short while, even if I couldn’t keep it. We had barely spoken in college. Our only interaction was the time he asked me to turn in a group project for him because he was too busy bringing Felicity an umbrella in a storm. It was pure chance that I ended up as an intern in his department after grad school. It was pure fate that his mother turned out to be my eccentric older friend from the dog park. Under her pressure, he had approached me one afternoon. “Norah,” he’d said, looking at a spreadsheet rather than me. “Would you consider marrying me?” No dating. No proposal. Just a business merger of lives. We signed the papers that afternoon and went to work the next day. Except for moving in together, nothing changed. He never told a soul. To the world, Gavin was a highly eligible bachelor. Now, the leading lady had returned to the stage. It was time for the extra to exit. When I came out of the bathroom, dried and dressed in old pajamas, Gavin was home. He was sitting on the sofa, reading a file. The lamp cast sharp shadows across his face. I gathered every ounce of courage I had. I walked up to him. “Gavin, I…” His phone rang, cutting through the silence like a knife. He answered, listened for two seconds, and his expression darkened. He grabbed his coat. “I’m sorry. It’s an emergency. We’ll talk when I get back, okay?” He never went out late. Never. Thirty minutes later, the emergency updated her social media. Thanks to a certain someone for the late-night hangover soup. The photo showed a bowl of soup and, in the corner, the distinctive cuff of a man’s shirt. My colleagues were already flooding the comments, speculating about wedding bells, gushing over how the icy boss had melted for his true love. I looked at the screen. My moon was returning to the sky, where he belonged. 2 My period arrived with a vengeance that night. I spent hours curled in a fetal position, drifting in and out of pain-filled sleep. When I finally woke up, the other side of the bed was cold. Gavin had already left. He liked to be at the office by 7:30. I was a “slide in at 8:59” kind of person. We lived together, but we commuted separately. When I walked into the office, the air smelled of roasted beans. Felicity was standing in the center of the aisle, looking fresh and vibrant, handing out coffees from a cardboard carrier. “Treat for the team!” she chirped. “Since I’m the new girl.” Colleagues were fawning over her, praising the “Princess” for her kindness, promising to work double-time today. She stopped at my desk and handed me a large iced Americano. “Sorry, Norah,” she said, her smile not quite reaching her eyes. “You came in a bit late, so this is the only one left.” My cramps were sending shockwaves through my lower back. Ice was the last thing I needed. But politeness is a reflex. “Thanks,” I muttered, taking the cup. I planned to dump it in the planter the moment she turned around. Partly because of the cramps. Mostly because it was from her. But Felicity didn’t leave. She stood there, her gaze drifting over me. “Norah, you’ve changed so much,” she said. “I almost didn’t recognize you last night.” “You’re thinner than you were in college. Prettier, too. I was surprised to find you working under Gavin.” In college, Gavin and I were in Class 3. She was in Class 1. We didn’t even share lecture halls. The fact that she remembered me was unsettling. She leaned against my partition, still smiling, but her eyes were scanning me like a barcode reader. It made my skin crawl. “I actually never thanked you for turning in that group project for Gavin back then,” she said breezily. “If you hadn’t, I would have been soaked waiting for him.” Then, the pivot. “Why did you choose this company, anyway? Did you know Gavin was here?” On the surface, it was casual small talk. But in an office full of sharks, it was blood in the water. It painted me as a stalker. I pressed my lips together, ready to retort, when the office door swung open. “Felicity. My office,” Gavin called out. She had been appointed directly by HQ as his executive secretary. “Coming!” She replied cheerfully, her heels clicking a rhythm of victory as she walked toward him. As the door clicked shut, the office buzzed again. I stared at the small framed photo on my desk. It was just me, taken on my birthday last year. The same day Gavin had asked me to marry him. I reached out and slid the back off the frame. Hidden behind the print was another photo. Younger, grainier. It was my college graduation. I was standing in front of the old humanities building, making a peace sign, looking goofy. My roommate had complained about the background. Why the ugly brick wall, Norah? Why not the fountain? I had told her the lighting was better. I lied. In the photo, five meters behind me, blurred but unmistakable, stood Gavin. At the exact moment the shutter clicked, he had looked up. He was looking right at the camera. Right at me. It was our first—and only—photo together. “Norah, meeting in the small conference room. Now.” I jumped, hastily shoving the photo into a folder on my desk. “Coming.” The “brief update” turned into a two-hour marathon. Cold sweat was trickling down my spine from the pain in my abdomen. When I finally stumbled out of the conference room, dizzy and nauseous, I saw a cluster of people around my desk. They were giggling. I walked closer, and my blood ran cold. Felicity was holding the photo. “So…” she drawled, flipping the picture over. She read the handwriting on the back, her voice loud and theatrical. “You are my moon.” She looked at me, her expression a mix of pity and amusement. “So I was right. You did stay here because of Gavin.” 3 I lunged for it. “Give that back!” She sidestepped me easily. “Norah, are you in love with him?” she asked, her voice dripping with faux innocence. Around us, the whispers turned into sneers. “She looks so quiet, but turns out she’s a creep,” someone muttered. ” ‘You are my moon’? God, I think I’m going to puke.” “Exactly. Felicity went abroad, sure, but Gavin waited three years for her. Hiding a photo like that? She’s trying to be a homewrecker.” “No wonder she worked so hard to pass the internship assessment. Talk about punching above her weight.” The air conditioning vent above me blasted freezing air. I was shaking. I wanted to scream. I wanted to tell them I am his wife. I wanted to tell them that when we reconnected, they were already broken up. But I knew it wouldn’t matter. Because Gavin had never claimed me. Tears welled in my eyes, hot and stinging. I bit the inside of my cheek until I tasted copper, refusing to let them fall. If I cried, I lost the last shred of my dignity. I snatched the photo from Felicity’s hand, ripping it in the process. I didn’t look at it. I tore it into shreds and dropped it into the trash can. “Happy?” I choked out. Felicity opened her mouth to twist the knife further, but the office door opened. “What is going on out here? Do you not have work to do?” Gavin’s voice cracked like a whip. The crowd scattered like cockroaches when the lights turn on. Gavin walked over to me. He looked at my pale face, then down at the trash can. He saw the fragments of the photo. “Why did you…” he started, his brow furrowing. I didn’t let him finish. I pushed past him, head down, and ran for the bathroom. I couldn’t look at him. Not now. I was terrified that if he knew—if he realized I had harbored feelings for him long before our arrangement—he would look at me with the same disgust as everyone else. I survived the rest of the day in a fugue state. When I walked out of the building at 5:00 PM, Felicity was waiting. “Norah. We need to talk.” We went to a coffee shop nearby. The smell of caramel usually comforted me; today it smelled like burnt sugar and judgment. “I called Gavin before I came back to the States,” Felicity said, not bothering to touch her drink. “He told me he was married. To you.” She laughed, a sharp, brittle sound. “I asked him if he loved you. Do you want to know what he said?” Her manicured fingernails tapped against the wooden table. Tap. Tap. Tap. I didn’t need to ask. The answer was obvious. If he loved me, she wouldn’t be sitting here. “Mrs. Gavin,” I said, my voice steadier than I felt. “If he wants a divorce, he needs to tell me himself.” Felicity looked surprised by my backbone, but her smirk returned quickly. “Oh, the divorce is happening. Now that I’m back, it’s just a matter of paperwork. But…” She leaned in, lowering her voice. “Do you really think Gavin didn’t know about your little crush back in college? Do you think nobody noticed you hoarding his graded papers?” My stomach dropped. “Do you know what he said when he found out?” She paused for effect. “He said, ‘That’s disgusting.’” It was true. Once, when he asked me to hand in an assignment, the graded papers were returned to me to distribute. I had kept his. I had kept it because his handwriting was beautiful, and it was the only thing of his I could own. To have that secret, that silly schoolgirl moment, dragged out and weaponized… the shame was blinding. I stood up and left her there. When I got home, Gavin was already there. On the coffee table in front of him lay a file folder. Only one word was visible on the cover: DIVORCE. Gavin took off his wire-rimmed glasses and looked at me. “Norah, there’s something I need to discuss with you.” 4 Gavin was, above all things, a decent man. Even in divorce, he wanted to “discuss.” What was there to discuss? Was he afraid I’d demand alimony? Was he afraid I’d cling to his leg and beg him to stay? I sniffed, fighting the congestion in my nose, and forced a smile. It felt like stretching calm over a screaming void. “It’s okay,” I said. “I understand.” “You can tell your mom. I’ll make it easy.” “Also… when do you need me to move out?” Gavin froze. For a second, genuine confusion clouded his eyes. I widened my smile until my face hurt. “Give it to me. You need a signature, right?” “Are you misunder—” The doorbell rang. Gavin stood up and opened the door. Felicity collapsed into his arms, sobbing. “Gavin! Someone was following me! I’m so scared…” She was wearing a lace slip dress—a stark contrast to the power suit from this morning, but equally calculated. She looked fragile. Beautiful. Maybe because I was standing right there, Gavin frowned and peeled her off him. “What are you doing here?” he asked, his voice tight. He glanced back at me, a flicker of panic in his eyes. I didn’t want to watch this. I waved my hand dismissively. “You guys talk. I’m going to the bedroom.” Gavin had given me enough respect during our marriage. I wasn’t going to be the pathetic wife lurking in the corner while the true loves reunited. I closed the bedroom door and leaned against it. My face, frozen in that rictus of a smile, finally collapsed. I buried myself in the duvet, biting down on the corner of the pillow to muffle the sound. The dam broke. I cried until my chest ached, until my eyes were swollen shut. When I finally emerged, the apartment was silent. Gavin was gone. Felicity was gone. I picked up my phone, intending to text him about the timeline for the filing. Instead, I saw Felicity’s new post. Two words: Conquered him. The photo was a selfie. On her pale neck, a fresh, dark hickey was prominently displayed. My phone slipped from my hand and hit the floor with a clatter. I picked it up, forcing my brain to shut down. Don’t imagine it. Don’t imagine them. I moved like a robot. Suitcase. Clothes. Toiletries. Laptop. I walked into the living room. The file on the table—the one that said DIVORCE—was gone. He must have taken it. I opened my laptop, downloaded a standard divorce agreement template, and filled in our details. I signed it. I left it in the center of the coffee table. Gavin, I thought. We are officially over. Gavin had spent three hours dealing with Felicity. He had dragged her to the police station to file a report for the “stalker,” and then he had driven to the office to submit his immediate resignation to Headquarters. It was nearly midnight when he unlocked his front door. He was exhausted. The apartment was dark. Norah must be asleep. He felt a knot of anxiety in his stomach. He didn’t know if she would agree to leave the city with him. He wanted to move to Seattle, start fresh, away from this toxic office culture. He flipped on the lights. His eyes locked onto the white paper sitting on the coffee table. DIVORCE AGREEMENT. 5 Gavin’s heart rate spiked so hard he felt it in his throat. He didn’t even take off his shoes. He stumbled over the edge of the rug in his haste to reach the table.

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Margo told me I was crazy to sink my savings into a sprawling mid-century modern for a wedding gift to ourselves. She hummed and hawed about interest rates and the volatile market, begging me to wait. But I couldn’t wait. I was turning thirty. In my head, signing the deed was the only way to anchor the drifting ship of my relationship before we could finally say “I do.” The day I wired the earnest money, I sat in our living room, the purchase agreement in hand, vibrating with excitement. I was waiting for Gary to come home so I could drop the surprise. When he walked in, he didn’t smile. He looked grim, like a man walking to the gallows. “Nora,” he said, his voice heavy. “The house money… I need to use it to get Sasha a lease on a place downtown.” I froze. He sighed, running a hand through his hair. “She just got back to the States. She has no credit history, no family here. She’s fragile, Nora. We can wait on the house. We can squeeze into a smaller apartment for a while, can’t we?” My phone buzzed in my lap. A text from Margo: Nora, I can’t keep my mouth shut anymore. I was at the leasing office at The Kensington today. I saw Gary and Sasha. They were looking at the penthouses. Pretty sure he put down a deposit. Don’t let him play you. I looked at the screen, blinking as the text blurred, then looked up at Gary’s face. He looked so self-righteous. So sure of his moral high ground. The contract in my hand suddenly felt like a joke. A paper prop in a bad play. I nodded slowly. “Okay.” Then, right in front of him, I dialed the realtor. “Hi, David. Yeah, it’s Nora. Cancel the contract.” David, the realtor, sputtered on the other end. “Nora, you know if you walk away now, you lose the earnest money. That’s fifty grand.” “Oh,” I said, my voice flat, devoid of any tremor. “That’s fine. I don’t want it anymore.” I hung up. The silence in the room was deafening. 1 Gary’s face was a study in confusion. He looked as if I’d just spoken in a dead language. He clearly hadn’t expected the nuclear option. He stepped closer, reaching out to hug me. “Nora, don’t be dramatic. I know you’re disappointed. But we have a lifetime to buy a house, right?” I didn’t hug him back. I stood there wondering: Do we really have a lifetime? I walked past him into the living room and sat on the hardwood floor. The space where I had planned to put a new Italian leather sofa was currently covered in a drop cloth. Spread out across it were my tools: bone folders, Japanese tissue, wheat starch paste. The air smelled of old paper—a scent of vanilla and decay—and the sharp, vinegary tang of the reversible glue I used. Gary wrinkled his nose. He hated that smell. “Nora, stop it,” he said, his tone shifting into that authoritative register he used when he wanted to close a deal. “What are we doing for dinner?” I didn’t look up from the foxed page I was treating. I just pointed a finger at the dining table. Sitting there, lonely and pathetic, was a single cup of instant noodles. He walked over and loomed above me. “The apartment for Sasha is just a rental, Nora. It’s not like I bought it. She’s alone, her health is a mess…” He started the speech. The one I knew by heart. The one about responsibility. About how Sasha’s brother had died serving in the same unit as him, and how looking after her was a sacred blood oath. I didn’t argue. I didn’t look at him. I picked up a hake brush, soft as a whisper, and gently swept the dust from the spine of the book. “Okay,” I said softly. One word. It choked off the rest of his monologue. He must have thought I was just sulking. He sighed, reached into his briefcase, and pulled out a velvet-wrapped box. “Nora, look. I won this at an auction for you. It’s a Song Dynasty inkstone. For the new study.” He opened the box. The stone was dark, cool, and undeniably expensive. I finally looked up. I glanced at the inkstone, then at him. “Keep it,” I said. “Or send me the invoice from the auction house, and I’ll wire you the cost.” The expectation on Gary’s face cracked, fracturing like cheap glass. “What… what is that supposed to mean?” I didn’t answer. I looked down and opened a camphor wood chest. From inside, I reverently lifted a set of brass finishing tools wrapped in silk. They were antique French gilding instruments I had inherited from my mentor. I never took them out of the house. Now, I was packing them. One by one. Panic, real and sudden, finally hit him. He lunged forward, grabbing my wrist. His grip was too tight. “Nora! What the hell are you doing?” It hurt, but I didn’t wince. I just calmly pulled my hand from his grasp. “I’m going to the studio. Overtime. We have a deadline on a restoration.” He stood frozen, watching me pack my life away with terrifying efficiency. He finally realized this wasn’t a tantrum. 2 I pulled an all-nighter at the studio, stabilizing a crumbling 18th-century map. I didn’t go home the next day. Instead, I met Margo at a gallery opening in Chelsea. Gary hated my job. He called my studio “a dusty recycling center for things that should be thrown away.” He hated my friends even more, calling them “pretentious bohemians with empty pockets.” The opening was loud, a sea of expensive perfume and clinking glass. Margo raised her champagne flute against mine. “Finally seeing the light?” I smiled, a small, sad thing, and downed my drink. We stayed until the gallery closed. I posted a photo of the toast on Instagram. No caption. Just the image. When I got home, it was 2:00 AM. The apartment was dark, save for the cherry-red ember of a cigarette glowing by the sofa. I flipped the switch. Gary was sitting there, scowling. The ashtray was overflowing. He crushed the cigarette out, adopting the tone of a disappointed father. “Where have you been? Staying out late just to punish me? That’s childish, Nora.” I hadn’t slept in thirty hours. I had champagne in my system. My bones felt heavy. I didn’t have the energy to fight. I looked him in the eye and said, “Gary, your rules don’t apply to me anymore.” I didn’t go to the master bedroom. I walked straight to the guest room—the one he’d made me turn into a storage closet for his off-season suits and golf clubs. I pushed the door open, ignoring his stunned expression, and stepped inside. Click. I locked it. I waited for the pounding on the door. The shouting. But there was only silence. The next morning, the Cold War began. I showered and dressed. He sat at the kitchen island reading the Wall Street Journal, pretending I didn’t exist. I ignored him right back. I made coffee, leaned against the counter, and dialed Dr. Thorne, the director of the National Archives. “Dr. Thorne, hello. It’s Nora Jinx.” “Regarding the ‘Blackwood Abbey’ manuscript project… I’ve thought it over. I accept.” Dr. Thorne was ecstatic on the other end of the line. Behind me, the rustling of the newspaper stopped. The project was a three-year residency. Closed campus. Deep in the Adirondack Mountains, restoring a library of theological texts damaged by water and time. I had turned it down months ago because Gary threw a fit about long-distance relationships. I hung up the phone and walked back to the guest room without glancing at him. That evening, I came back from the studio to grab some reference books. I walked in to find Gary on the phone, a soft, tender look on his face that I hadn’t seen in years. “Just listen to me, don’t be stubborn. I hired a nutritionist for you; she starts tomorrow.” “I know the food here upsets your stomach. I had the housekeeper make that bird’s nest soup you like. I’ll bring it over soon.” He saw me, and the smile vanished. He hung up abruptly. I assumed it was Sasha. He braced himself, expecting me to scream or cry. But I just walked past him. I spread a large topographic map on the living room rug—part of the dossier Dr. Thorne had sent over. I took a red marker and started circling routes, planning the drive into the mountains. He was arranging a private chef for his “fragile bird,” worrying about her digestion. And I sat in front of him, mapping out a life that didn’t include him. 3 In the middle of the night, a knock on the guest room door jolted me awake. I opened it to find Gary swaying in the hallway, smelling of scotch. He blinked, seeming surprised that I was actually sleeping in the storage room. “Why haven’t you texted me all day? Not a single update?” I leaned against the doorframe, the question striking me as absurd. He started rambling. “You know, at dinner tonight, Cole and the guys… their wives were calling every hour. Checking in. Asking when they’d be home.” “And me? I sat there like an idiot with a silent phone. Like nobody gave a damn about me.” His voice was thick with self-pity. My head was pounding. I stared at him, my patience evaporating. “You hate it when I check in,” I said. “You told me it was suffocating. You said it was an ‘invasion of your privacy’ and showed a lack of trust.” “I’m trusting you now. Isn’t that what you wanted?” He choked on his own words, his face flushing. Maybe because I didn’t sound angry, just tired, he misread the situation. He stepped closer, his voice softening into a slur. “Nora, I know you’re still mad about the house.” “Me and Sasha… it’s just brother and sister stuff. Her brother died for me. I can’t just leave her to rot.” “Stop overthinking it. I’ll bring you around more. You’ll see. It’s just you. It’s always been you.” I could barely keep my eyes open. I just wanted him to leave. I nodded, waving a hand dismissively. “Okay. Sure. Just let me sleep.” He took my exhaustion for surrender. He tried to push into the room, his hand reaching for my waist. “Come on, Nora. Don’t sleep in here. Let’s go back to bed…” The touch felt like a brand. I recoiled, stepping back so fast I nearly tripped. The sleep vanished instantly. “Get out.” My voice was ice. His hand hovered in mid-air. In the dim light, his face contorted—confusion, then embarrassment, then anger. “Nora, don’t be a bitch.” I looked him dead in the eye. “Get. Out.” He glared at me, chest heaving, before spinning around and storming off. The door to the master bedroom slammed hard enough to shake the walls. Finally. Silence. I locked the door and lay back down. Strangely, I didn’t feel like crying. My heart rate slowed almost immediately. I fell asleep within seconds. The next morning, while organizing my files, I scrolled through Instagram. There it was. Sasha’s new post. She was wearing an oversized white dress shirt—a man’s shirt—standing barefoot in front of floor-to-ceiling windows overlooking the skyline. Caption: Finally feels like I can breathe. Thank you for giving me a home, big brother. beneath it, Gary’s business partner, Cole, had commented: @NoraJinx You should be proud. Gary is a stand-up guy. Most men wouldn’t step up like that. I laughed. A dry, hollow sound. I replied with a single emoji – “Thanks”. Then I blocked Cole. 4 When my team at the studio found out I was taking the lead on the Blackwood Abbey project, they insisted on a celebration. We went to a high-end bistro near the flatiron. Everyone chipped in. The atmosphere was warm, genuine. These were people who respected the craft. This was an honor I had earned with my own hands. Midway through the meal, the door to our private room creaked open. One of my junior restorers poked her head back in, looking awkward. “Nora… um, Gary is in the room next door.” Before I could process that, Gary walked in. His entourage trailed behind him. And there was Sasha, clinging to his arm, beaming like she was the hostess of the event. She spotted me instantly. A flicker of triumph crossed her face before she masked it with a sweet smile. She raised her wine glass and walked over. “Nora! What a coincidence. We’re celebrating a closed deal. Gary was just talking about you. He said you’ve been so busy he barely sees you.” Her voice was soft, but pitched perfectly so everyone could hear. I didn’t look at her. I didn’t look at Gary. I gave a tight, polite nod to the air between them, said absolutely nothing, and turned my back to return to my table. My phone started buzzing in my purse. I glanced at it. A barrage of texts from Gary. Nora, don’t make a scene. It’s a team dinner. Sasha just wanted to thank everyone. I didn’t know you were here. When are you done? I’ll wait. I’ll drive you home. I silenced the phone and dropped it back into my bag. Towards the end of the night, Professor Halloway arrived. He was a legend in the field of conservation, frail now, but his presence commanded the room. He had come specifically for me. He raised a shaking glass, his voice booming with unexpected power. “Tonight, we are not here for just any dinner. We are here for Nora Jinx!” “We celebrate the preservation of history! We celebrate that our art will not die with us!” “To Nora. May your three years at Blackwood be filled with discovery. Go save history for us!” Applause erupted. Everyone stood up, raising their glasses to me. I felt tears prick my eyes. I stood up to respond. BANG. The door to our room was shoved open. Gary stood there, his face drained of blood. He must have come to find me when I didn’t text back, just in time to hear the toast. Behind him, Sasha looked furious, her eyes narrowing as if I had stolen something from her. Gary ignored the room full of shocked faces. He ignored Sasha. He stared at me, his eyes wide and unblinking, walking toward me like a sleepwalker. His voice trembled, distorted by shock and rising anger. “Three years?” “Where are you going?” It was almost funny. In five years, he had never once asked what book I was working on. Now, he wanted to know where I was going.

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“When is he finally going to get the hint and leave?” The voice coming from the breakroom wasn’t loud, but in the sterile silence of the hallway, every syllable landed with the weight of a stone. I stood frozen near the doorway, my ceramic mug tight in my hand. I didn’t breathe. “Soon, surely. It’s been three months.” “I’ll bet you a steak dinner he’s gone by Friday.” “You’re on.” I turned on my heel and walked back to my desk. My desk was situated directly next to the men’s restroom. The air there always carried a faint, chemical tang of industrial cleaner and stale plumbing, twenty-four hours a day. I sat down, woke my computer, and continued working on my spreadsheets. No one knew what I had been documenting every single day for the past three months. And no one knew how long the list of names was that I would be reading aloud at the Holiday Gala. 1. My name is Gavin Calloway. I am thirty-two years old. Three months ago, I was transferred to this branch office with the nebulous title of “Specialist.” I had no specific job description, no clear line of reporting, and not even a permanent ID badge. HR’s explanation was smooth and practiced: “It’s a transition period, Gavin. Just take some time to settle in.” I didn’t ask what “transition period” meant. I didn’t ask what I was supposed to be settling into. I just clocked in at nine sharp, sat at my desk, and built spreadsheets that nobody asked for. The first week, a few people offered tentative hellos. By the second week, the greetings evaporated. By the third week, the entire department—over twenty people—acted as if I were a ghost haunting the cubicles. If I walked down the aisle, they parted. If I sat in the breakroom, voices dropped to a hush. If I entered the kitchen, the laughter died instantly. I’m not stupid. I knew exactly what was happening. But I didn’t say a word. I just came in, did the work, and went home. On a Monday morning, I found my belongings in a box. My desk had been moved. Originally, I had a view of the parking lot; now, I was wedged against the wall sharing a partition with the restroom. “Mr. Calloway,” the administrative assistant said, her smile brittle and overly sweet. “It’s much quieter over here. We thought it would suit you better.” I looked at her. I didn’t say a thing. Fine. Move me. I carried my monitor over, arranged my binders, and went back to work. The restroom door opened and closed all day, wafting drafts of air freshener and dampness. People walked by, covering their noses and snickering. I pretended I was deaf and blind. At noon, the department had a team lunch. I was the last to know. Correction: I didn’t “know.” I discovered it. At twelve-thirty, the bullpen was a ghost town. I went to refill my water and heard the faint ding of the elevator and the echo of raucous laughter fading down the shaft. Back at my desk, I checked the group chat on my phone. A photo had just been posted. “Lunch on Director Hanes! Bottoms up!” The picture showed a table groaning under plates of appetizers, twenty-odd people raising wine glasses, beaming at the camera. I scrolled up. No one had tagged me. No one had typed, Hey Gavin, are you coming? It was a total erasure of my existence. They returned at two o’clock. Brett Cavallari, the Marketing Manager, led the pack. His face was flushed with expensive Cabernet. He paused as he passed my exile by the bathroom. “Oh! Gavin! You didn’t come to lunch?” I looked up from my screen. “Nobody invited me.” He blinked, a theatrical performance of surprise, before a smirk tugged at the corner of his mouth. “Ah, damn. Slipped my mind. Next time, buddy.” He walked away. I lowered my head and resumed typing. A colleague in the next cubicle whispered, “God, stop acting like a victim. Waiting for an engraved invitation?” Another voice giggled. “He’s got thick skin. Let him rot.” I didn’t turn around. Instead, I opened a fresh, blank document. On the first line, I typed: December 3rd. Department Lunch. Expense Account Misuse. Exclusionary Tactics. Then I listed their names, one by one. Save. Close. Return to the spreadsheets. At four o’clock, I finished a comprehensive market analysis report. This was work I had found for myself; nobody had assigned it, nobody expected it. But I did it, and I did it with precision. I emailed the PDF to Brett Cavallari and cc’d Director Hanes. “Brett, attached is the Q4 market data analysis for your review.” Five minutes later, Brett replied. “Received.” One word. The next day, I saw the report on Director Hanes’s LinkedIn feed. The caption read: “Incredible work by the Cavallari Team! This depth of analysis is world-class!” The comments section was a chorus of praise. “Brett is a machine!” “Great leadership, Brett!” “Detailed and sharp. Kudos to the team!” I opened the PDF attached to the post. On the title page, my name was gone. It now read: Author: The Cavallari Team. I stared at those words for a long time. The screen blurred slightly, then sharpened again. I opened my private document. New line. December 4th. Intellectual Property Theft. Plagiarism. Brett Cavallari. Save. Close. The pattern repeated itself over the next few days. My slide deck became Lisa’s presentation. My data cleanup became Ryan’s “initiative.” My strategic proposal became “Departmental Collective Wisdom.” Every single time, I wrote it down. Date. Content. Personnel involved. Item by item. Crystal clear. On Friday afternoon, Brett called me into his office. “Gavin.” He was leaning back in his leather chair, ankle resting on his knee, looking every inch the king of his little kingdom. “How long have you been with us?” “Three weeks.” “How’s it feeling?” “It’s fine.” He smiled, but the warmth didn’t reach his eyes. It was a shark’s smile. “Fine? You think your performance is ‘fine’?” I stayed silent. “Gavin, let me be level with you.” He leaned forward, dropping the casual facade. “You don’t fit in here. The culture… it’s not for you.” “Oh.” “Look at you. You’re antisocial. You’re passive. You sit there alone all day like a piece of furniture.” “Okay.” “Don’t you have anything to say for yourself?” I looked him in the eye, keeping my voice flat. “Brett, what would you like me to say?” He scoffed, a short, sharp sound. “I want you to have some self-awareness. If you were smart, you’d draft a resignation letter today. The company will give you a severance package. Walk away with some dignity.” “And if I don’t?” “If you don’t?” He leaned back again, lacing his fingers behind his head. “Then don’t blame me for what happens next. I won’t be polite about it.” I stood up. “Okay. I understand.” “Understand what?” “That you won’t be polite.” I walked out and closed the door softly behind me. Back at my desk, I opened the document. December 8th. Verbal intimidation. Coercion to resign. Threat of retaliation. Brett Cavallari. Save. Close. I glanced at the calendar on the wall. Three months. It was enough time. 2. By the fourth week, the isolation mutated into active hostility. It wasn’t just ignoring me anymore. Meetings happened without me. My reimbursement requests were “accidentally” lost. The printer jammed every time I sent a document, and miraculously fixed itself when Lisa walked up. When I requested basic office supplies, the system rejected me. I bought my own stapler. My own pens. I even brought in a ream of paper from home. One afternoon, I went to the admin desk to ask for a notebook. The assistant, Becca, gave me that plastic smile again. “Mr. Calloway, I don’t see a request in the portal.” “I submitted it last week.” She shrugged. “Glitch in the system, maybe? Try again.” I submitted it again. A week later, still nothing. I stopped asking. I went to the CVS downstairs, bought a three-pack of spiral notebooks, and used those. On Wednesday afternoon, I overheard the betting pool in the breakroom. “I bet he quits this week.” “I say next week.” “What’s the wager?” “Ruth’s Chris. Steak and martinis. Winner takes all.” “Deal.” I stood outside the door, holding my empty mug, motionless. They hadn’t seen me. “Why doesn’t he just leave? It’s pathetic. He’s got no pride.” “Probably holding out for the severance.” “Severance? Who does he think he is? He’s a nobody.” Laughter. Sharp and jagged. I turned around, making my footsteps soft on the carpet. Back at my desk, I opened the document. December 11th. Hostile work environment. Betting pool on employee termination. Harassment. Save. I looked at the screen and felt a small, cold smile touch my lips. Steak dinner. Sounds nice. I’ll be treating you all soon enough. That afternoon, Brett made his move. The Monthly Department All-Hands meeting. Mandatory for everyone. Ten minutes before the hour, the office began to stir. People were grabbing notepads and laptops. I turned to Ryan in the next cubicle. “Is there a meeting?” He glanced at me, eyes sliding away, and grabbed his coffee. Didn’t say a word. Just walked off. I stood up and caught Lisa in the hallway. “Lisa, what time is the meeting? Which conference room?” Lisa didn’t even break stride. “I don’t know.” I stood there in the aisle, watching them file out, one by one, disappearing around the corner like a receding tide. The office fell silent. Just me. I checked my email. No invite. I checked the Slack channel. Nothing. I sat back down. December 12th. Exclusion from mandatory all-hands meeting. deliberate obstruction of information. I thought for a moment, then typed: Meeting agenda: TBD. Thirty minutes later, they flooded back. Brett was at the front, looking annoyed about something. He stopped when he saw me. “Gavin. Why weren’t you at the meeting?” I looked up. “I wasn’t invited.” “We sent the invite,” he said, frowning with exaggerated confusion. “It was on the group calendar.” “I checked. It wasn’t.” “Well, maybe you just missed it.” His tone dripped with condescension. “Pay closer attention next time.” I didn’t argue. He walked away. I pulled out my phone and took a screenshot of the group calendar. Empty. I took a screenshot of my inbox. Empty. I dragged the images into a secure folder. Evidence +1. Friday was my birthday. No one knew. No one asked. I sat by the restroom, eating a cold turkey sandwich from the vending machine, staring out the window. The sky was the color of wet concrete, matching the endless sprawl of office parks. I was thirty-two. Ten years ago, I was fresh out of college, hungry and ambitious. Five years ago, I was in middle management, feeling like I owned the world. One year ago, I was transferred here to start over. Now, I was the guy by the toilet eating a vending machine sandwich on his birthday. My phone pinged. An email. Sender: HR Subject: [Action Required] Exit Interview Schedule I clicked it open. Mr. Calloway, please report to HR on December 15th at 3:00 PM for your exit interview. I stared at the screen. An exit interview. They hadn’t even fired me yet. They hadn’t even spoken to me. They just sent the invite, assuming I would break. I didn’t reply. I opened my document. December 13th. Preemptive termination procedure. Constructive discharge attempt. I closed the laptop. I stood up, grabbed my coat, and walked out. The elevator was empty. I caught my reflection in the polished steel doors. I looked tired, but my eyes were clear. Three weeks down. They didn’t know who I was. They didn’t know why I was here. And they certainly didn’t know what was going to happen at the Holiday Gala in three months. I pressed the button for the lobby. No rush. Let them dig the hole a little deeper. 3. I arrived at the exit interview exactly on time. The HR Manager, Pamela, was in her early thirties, rimless glasses, soft cardigan. She looked harmless. But her opening line told me everything I needed to know. “Gavin, sit.” I sat. She shuffled a file folder, then looked up with a practiced grimace. “Gavin, you’ve been with the branch for almost a month.” “Yes.” “How are you finding it?” “It’s fine.” She smiled, a tight, corporate expression. “Gavin, I’ll be direct. The company isn’t satisfied with your performance.” “Specifically?” “Across the board.” She gestured vaguely. “You don’t integrate with the team. You’re passive. Your output is low…” I cut her off. “The Q4 Market Analysis that Director Hanes posted on LinkedIn? I wrote that.” She paused, blinking rapidly. “That… I believe that was a Cavallari Team effort.” “The byline said Cavallari Team. The author was me.” She frowned. “Do you have proof?” I laughed. It was a dry, humorless sound. “Pamela, I’m here to listen to you, not argue. Please, continue.” She looked unsettled but quickly recovered her script. “Regardless, the consensus is that it would be best if you initiated your resignation. We can offer you a severance package—two weeks’ pay—to help with the transition.” “And if I don’t?” “If you don’t?” She pushed her glasses up her nose. “Then it gets messy. You know how these things go. Performance improvement plans, documentation…” She didn’t finish the sentence, but the threat was loud and clear. Leave, or we will make your life hell until you break. I stood up. “Okay. I understand.” “Think it over. Let me know by tomorrow.” “I don’t need to think it over.” “Excuse me?”

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