Chapter 1 - The First Thread
I sat in my car in the clinic parking lot for a long time, staring at the green indicator light on my phone. The screen showed Brendan’s text message glowing against the dark interior of the dashboard: Come tomorrow. We still have three things left to take care of.
My reflection in the rearview mirror looked smaller than it had two hours ago. My skin had a pale, washed-out tint from the blood draw, but beneath the shock, something else was hardening. A cold, heavy clarity was replacing the dizzy panic. For three years, I had apologized for taking up space, for needing reassurance, for being the girl who didn't fit into the frictionless world of La Jolla country clubs and private race tracks. Now I knew why I never fit. I wasn't meant to belong. I was meant to be a project.
I put the car in drive and drove straight to the small apartment in Pacific Beach that I had spent three years treating like a transit station while pouring all my energy into Brendan’s life.
The lease was in my name. Everything inside it, from the second-hand mid-century dresser I had sanded down myself to the framed prints of Yosemite my father had bought me for my college graduation, belonged to me.
My phone buzzed again. This time it wasn't Brendan. It was an email notification from the university archives—a routine follow-up request regarding my student digital portfolio that I had submitted months ago. But as I glanced at the sender, my pulse spiked. The name on the automated receipt wasn't just an administrator; it was a digital signature tracking a metadata modification log on my final thesis project from four years ago.
Four years ago. The exact semester of the university dance competition. The semester Scarlett Montgomery had lost.
I opened my laptop on the kitchen island, bypassing the television that Brendan never let me watch because he hated the sound of dialogue. My fingers shook slightly as I logged into my old university cloud account, digging deeper into the hidden version history of my digital submissions than any student ever needed to go.
There it was. A secondary access log showing that my thesis file had been downloaded, altered, and re-uploaded with corrupted citation formatting just forty-eight hours before the final grading deadline—the exact incident that had triggered the false plagiarism warning and forced me to spend twenty-four frantic hours tracking down professors to prove my innocence.
The IP address attached to the modification wasn't a campus lab. It was registered to a residential commercial router in La Jolla.
A router belonging to a shared private network used by Brendan and Mason.
My phone rang this time with a voice call. Brendan’s name flashed across the screen with a cheerful custom ringtone I had assigned him during our first month together. I stared at it until the ringing stopped, leaving an echo of silence in the quiet apartment.
I didn't block him. Not yet. If there were three things left on their list, I needed to know what the remaining items were before they realized I had stopped playing my assigned part.
Instead, I opened a new browser tab and began looking up storage units in San Bernardino, close to my parents' house. If I was going to Tucson with them next week, I needed to pack up my life quietly. But more importantly, I needed to figure out what Scarlett Montgomery’s role was in the final three items on that list.
My phone buzzed with a short text from Mason this time.
Hey Chloe, Brendan says don't forget to bring those old receipts from the charity gala tomorrow. He needs them for his tax folder.
Charity gala. That was the first item on the final countdown. An event scheduled for tomorrow evening where I was supposed to secure a high-profile table donation from an elderly philanthropist who happened to be Scarlett’s uncle.
May you like
I looked at the screen, a thin smile touching the corners of my mouth for the first time that day. They thought I was still driving the car they built for me. They had no idea I had already unbuckled the seatbelt.
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