Chapter Two

by: Roxanne Rene

---

The alarm on Chloe’s phone read 9:17 PM. Eleven minutes staring at the open suitcase. She picked up the purple blouse she’d thrifted and dropped, its burgundy replacement button a small point of defiant pride. Through the door, her apartment waited—bookshelf color-coded since she was fourteen, furniture mismatched by preference, the shadow-box of moths a silent presence over her desk. She’d built this place like she built her life: to suit a logic entirely her own.

She lifted the blouse and folded it with the flat efficiency of someone who had packed in a hurry before, who had learned that belongings could be reduced to what fit in two bags and still be enough. The fabric was synthetic, slightly too shiny, the kind of thing that would read as festive in the right light and desperate in the wrong. Graham Ashcroft’s charity gala would feature professional lighting. She’d seen photographs from previous years, archived in the company’s public relations files: crystal chandeliers, candle arrays, the particular golden wash that made everyone look like they had never known financial anxiety. The blouse would survive. She placed it in the suitcase’s left corner, where it wouldn’t wrinkle, and reached for the next item.

The knock came at 9:23 PM, seven minutes after the first one she hadn’t answered, which meant Gemma had finally abandoned the pretense of waiting for permission. The door opened without the squeak of hinges that needed oiling—Chloe had fixed that three months ago, on a Sunday, because an uncontrolled variable was an irritant she refused to tolerate. Gemma’s footsteps crossed the living room with the certainty of someone who had mapped this space in previous emergencies, who knew which floorboards held and which ones betrayed.

“You’re packing,” Gemma said from the doorway. Not a question.

“You’re observing.”

“Someone has to.” Gemma crossed to the bed and sat without ceremony, her weight depressing the mattress exactly where Chloe’s thigh had been thirty seconds earlier. She wore a rust-colored sweater that had belonged to her mother, loose jeans with a frayed hem she’d refused to trim, and the particular expression Chloe had learned to associate with conversations Gemma was choosing not to have yet. Her arms folded. Her mouth pressed into the line it made when she was holding something back.

Chloe added a gray cardigan to the suitcase, folded into thirds. “The Tesla’s in the garage downstairs. Fully charged. I checked twice.”

“You know that’s not what I’m going to say.”

“I know.” Chloe reached into her closet for the dress she’d selected for the gala itself—a navy thrift find with a silhouette that suggested 1950s cocktail attire, altered at a shop in Jackson Heights where the seamstress never asked why her clients needed things ready by Friday. She’d tried it on that morning, standing on her toilet lid to see the full length in the bathroom mirror, …and was satisfied by the way it gave her shoulders an authority fit for rooms she had never entered. “But you’re going to say it anyway, so you might as well get it over with.”

Gemma leaned back on her palms, elbows locked. It was the same look of assessment she’d perfected over fifteen years, ever since she’d refused to abandon that middle-school lunch table until Chloe’s silence finally broke. Gemma knew the architecture of her defenses better than anyone, which was exactly why she was the only person who could get away with what she was about to say.

“It’s a bad idea,” Gemma said.

“Which part? The fake engagement, the four-day performance, or the man who alphabetizes his emotional availability?”

“He doesn’t alphabetize his spices?“

“He would if he cooked.” Chloe allowed the corner of her mouth to move, not quite upward. “I told him that. He conceded the point.”

Gemma didn’t laugh. Her eyes tracked to the suitcase, to Chloe’s hands as they smoothed the dress’s skirt into submission. “The whole thing. The contract, the money, the weekend at the estate. All of it.”

Chloe added the dress to the growing pile. She had braced herself for this conversation—the pushback, the concern, the warnings about catching feelings. But Gemma hadn’t mentioned romance. The silence on that front was more unnerving than the lecture Chloe had expected, and she found herself waiting for a shoe that wasn’t dropping.

I’m packing because five thousand dollars covers two months of my brother’s medical copays, because I’ve watched Graham Ashcroft optimize relationships like spreadsheets for three years, and because—” She cut herself off, turning away to fiddle with a loose thread on the cardigan.

“Because what?” Gemma pressed.

Chloe straightened, her voice suddenly crisp. “Because I’ve signed the contract. Renegotiating with myself would be unprofessional.”

Gemma’s expression didn’t change, but something shifted in the set of her shoulders—a slight relaxation that meant she’d heard what she needed to hear, even if she didn’t believe it entirely. “Fine. It’s not a romance. I won’t pretend otherwise either.” She uncrossed her arms, recrossed them tighter. “But Chloe. It’s fine to give a man like Graham your time. Your labor, your performance, whatever he’s paying for. Just don’t give him your peace of mind.”

The words landed with the precision Gemma had always possessed. Peace of mind. Chloe’s throat tightened. The phrase conjured the smell of chlorine and the panicked burn in her lungs as she fought for the surface of the public pool, the water a cold weight closing over her head. She’d learned then, gasping in Daniel’s arms, to mistrust anything she couldn’t stand on. Her own two feet. Nothing else.

“I’m done with personal disappointment,” Chloe said. The words came out flat and absolute, a door clicking shut in the quiet room.

Gemma held her gaze for three long seconds. Then she gave a short nod—not agreement, but acknowledgment. “Okay.”

“Okay?”

“You’re going to do what you’re going to do. You’ve been doing it since you were twelve and decided that sarcasm was armor and organization was religion.” Gemma shifted on the bed, drawing her knees up, wrapping her arms around them. “I’ll be here when you get back. With wine and the appropriate expression.”

Chloe turned back to the suitcase, the unexpected honesty of their conversation still ringing in her ears. She reached into her closet again, past the practical layers, and her fingers found the bathing suit she’d bought three years ago for a vacation canceled by Daniel’s worsening health. It was black, modestly cut, the kind of thing that would disappear against any resort’s expected palette of bright prints and strategic cutouts.

She held it over the open suitcase, deliberating. She wouldn’t swim. The Ashcroft estate sat on Lake Erie, and Chloe had not entered water above her waist since she was seven years old, since Daniel’s hands had pulled her gasping from the deep end of a public pool and she’d learned that the surface could lie about its distance. But the estate had a terrace. It had gardens stepping down toward the water. It had Graham Ashcroft in tailored casual wear, whatever that would look like when applied to a man who treated relaxation as a scheduling problem.

She folded the suit into a compact square and tucked it into the suitcase’s right corner, behind the shoes, where it wouldn’t crease.

Gemma watched this without comment. Her eyes followed Chloe’s hands as they moved to the lingerie drawer, hovering over the practical cotton of her daily life before reaching past it to the set she’d purchased on impulse after her last relationship ended—a black bikini underwear and matching bra that had seemed like aspirational buying at the time, the kind of thing worn by women in films who had their lives together in ways Chloe had long since stopped pretending about.

She held them up. They took almost no space. They would make no difference to the success or failure of her performance. But she imagined Graham’s face—the particular freeze of his features when something exceeded his projections, the micromovement in his jaw when his control encountered an unanticipated variable. She imagined him finding these in a drawer, or seeing the edge of lace beneath her practical dress, or simply knowing they existed in his parents’ house as evidence that she was not entirely governable.

It was a small rebellion. It was also, she was willing to admit only to herself, a private satisfaction that had little to do with political resistance and something to do with the way Graham’s composure made her want to find the seam in it, the place where it had been carefully joined, and work her thumbnail in.

She tucked the set behind the bathing suit, deeper in the suitcase, where she would have to reach deliberately to find it.

“You won’t need those,” Gemma said. Not a question this time either.

“Probably not.”

“Then why—“

“Because they’re mine to want.” Chloe zipped the internal pocket, sealing the small secrets away. “Because he’s paying for my time and my performance, not my interior life. Because—” She paused, aware again of the edge of confession, and chose the version that sounded more calculated than it felt. “Because if I’m going to spend four days pretending to be someone’s ideal match, I’m going to retain some evidence that I’m not.”

Gemma was quiet for a moment. Then: “He’s going to misread that.”

“Probably.”

“As intentional provocation. As signaling interest.”

Chloe closed the suitcase’s main compartment with a decisive click, the sound sharp enough to end the conversation if she wanted it to. “Then he’ll misread it. I’ve spent three years working for a man who thinks everything can be optimized. A little strategic inefficiency won’t hurt him.”

She lifted the suitcase to the floor and stood, moving to the mirror above her dresser. The ring sat where she’d placed it after arriving home—on her right hand, middle finger, where the contract specified it should live until her performance required the left. She adjusted it once, feeling its unfamiliar weight, …the way it caught the light and shattered it, reminding her of other people’s promises.

Gemma had moved to the bed’s edge, her feet flat on the floor, watching Chloe’s reflection. Her gaze lifted past Chloe to the wall above the desk. “You always look at the moth box before you do something risky,” she said, her voice quiet. “You haven’t looked at it once.”

Chloe’s eyes found the shadow-frame, the neat rows of pinned specimens. Antheraea polyphemus, female, found deceased, August 2004. The labels were in her own fourteen-year-old handwriting, a taxonomy she’d invented in Daniel’s apartment while waiting for a mother who had already started over.

“It doesn’t travel,” Chloe said. “You know that.”

“I know you look at it when you’re deciding whether something’s worth the risk.”

Chloe turned from the mirror. Her work bag hung on its hook by the door, her keys in their ceramic dish, her phone face-down on the nightstand. The apartment surrounded her with evidence of a self she’d constructed piece by piece, each object a refusal to disappear completely when people had given her reasons to. The moths had been her first collection, begun before she understood that collecting was a way of paying attention to a world that wasn’t paying attention back.

“Everything’s a risk,” Chloe said. She picked up her bag, felt its familiar weight settle against her shoulder. “This one’s quantified. There’s a contract.”

“There’s always a contract. The ones that ruin you are the ones you’ve already agreed to before you realize there was anything to sign.”

Chloe looked at her friend—really looked, taking in the rust sweater and the frayed jeans and the mouth still pressed in that careful line, the one that meant Gemma had more to say and was choosing not to say it. Chloe read the silence as clearly as any speech. For fifteen years, the space between what Gemma said and what she meant was where their real conversations happened.

“Thank you,” Chloe said. “For showing up. For the warning. For not making me say it’s not what it looks like.”

Gemma’s expression softened, the line of her mouth relaxing into something closer to its natural shape. “I’ll make the coffee for when you get back. The good kind, not the emergency backup.”

“And the waffles?”

“Never the waffles.” Gemma stood, crossed to the door, paused with her hand on the handle. “Chloe. The peace of mind thing—I’m not taking it back. Even if you’re done with disappointment, the world isn’t done with handing it out. Just remember which things are actually yours to lose.”

She left without waiting for a response, the door clicking shut with the precision of someone who knew exactly how hard to pull. Chloe stood in the sudden quiet of her apartment, the suitcase at her feet, the moth collection watching from the wall with their paper wings and her childhood labels. She touched the ring on her right hand again, adjusted it once more, and picked up her bag.

The Tesla waited in the garage. Graham Ashcroft waited somewhere in the city. She tried to picture him at home and saw only an extension of his office: cool leather, polished steel, and silence. Nothing mismatched, nothing out of place, nothing that wasn’t optimized for a predictable outcome. In forty-eight hours, she would be wearing his ex-fiancée’s recycled diamond on her left hand, performing devotion for an audience who had spent decades learning to detect insincerity.

She was ready. She had always been ready, since she was seven years old and learned that the world could restructure itself without warning, leaving you with two bags and the determination to never need anyone enough that losing them could destroy you. The contract in her pocket specified the terms. The money in her future specified the security. The only variable unaccounted for was the one she refused to name—a flicker of pure, unprofessional curiosity. A desire to see if Graham Ashcroft, a man who cataloged every choice, could look at her across a dinner table and see something that wasn’t on his list.

Chloe Bennett did not deal in hope. She dealt in preparation, efficiency, and the private satisfaction of imagining her boss’s composure cracking at the sight of unexpected lace. That was sufficient. It would have to be.

She turned off the light and closed the door behind her, leaving the moths to their watch over an empty room.

---

Back to Chapter One <— —> Go to Chapter Three