chapter 10
For a second, his face twisted, human and naked. “She’s scared,” he said, but it sounded like he was telling himself.
“I’m not an orbit,” I said. “I’m a person.”
He shook his head once, then again. “Anyway, if you ever need anything—”
“I won’t,” I said, not cruelly. Just true.
As he turned away, he hesitated. “Chloe?”
“Yes.”
“Did you ever… lie to me? About something important?”
He looked strangely hopeful, as if discovering I had lied would let him rewrite something fundamental.
“No,” I said. “That was our problem.”
He blinked. Left. The hall swallowed him.
The months that followed were ordinary in the way miracles are: they kept happening. I delivered the Harrison rollout ahead of schedule. We picked up a boutique perfume line and a small indie film festival in the same week. I started running again, slowly, in a long oval around the neighborhood park at dawn. I learned to make a decent omelet. I slept without dreaming dead things back to life.
The world, of course, didn’t forget me. Inns remembered. Someone screenshotted my winery moment and made a meme about girls who “can’t keep their emotions in check.” Someone else scavenged my old photos and found one where Daniel and I were wearing matching scarves, and captioned it: Imagine throwing away a decade over a dress-up picture.
A small, stubborn corner of me wanted to write an essay about context. I did not. I posted a picture of my morning coffee and a piece of toast and wrote: Good bread, good work, good morning.
One afternoon, a message popped up from an account I didn’t recognize:
Hi, Chloe. You don’t know me. My name is Lia. I used to date the bassist who played at your not-actually-engagement party. I know Ashley from a support group. I don’t know how to say this, but I think you should be careful. She told us things about you that… well. She said you wouldn’t mind her taking the photos with Daniel. She said you encouraged it so she could have a keepsake before an operation. And she said that if it came out, she’d take the heat because you “can’t handle stress.” It sounded weird to me. I’m sorry to dump this on you. I just thought… if you ever question your own memory, please don’t.
I watched the message for a long time. I wasn’t surprised. I had never believed Ashley to be a villain. I had always believed her to be a poet who wrote in other people’s blood and called it metaphor.
I wrote back: Thank you. I’m okay.