Total pages in book: 49
Estimated words: 44860 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 224(@200wpm)___ 179(@250wpm)___ 150(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 44860 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 224(@200wpm)___ 179(@250wpm)___ 150(@300wpm)
You couldn't train someone to do what Chelsea did. You couldn't put it in a briefing document or a bullet-pointed email. You couldn't schedule it or strategize it or reproduce it. It was just her, being her, and the rooms kept surrendering, and Kelly kept watching it happen with the quiet vertigo of a woman realizing that the rules she had spent her career mastering might never have been the point.
Kelly had confirmed it had gone well with a single nod, which in Kelly's vocabulary was the equivalent of a standing ovation, and Chelsea had glowed, and Kelly had looked away because the glowing was doing something to her professional objectivity that she was not yet ready to name.
They arrived ten minutes early at the cafe, a place with exposed brick and trailing plants and the kind of atmosphere that made Chelsea suspect a single coffee here could pay for a week of groceries. She had ordered a chamomile tea and was watching the steam curl above it in a way that probably looked contemplative but was actually just her thinking about the book she'd given Olivio this morning and wondering if he'd started reading it yet, and whether the green tab she'd placed at the passage about the manuscript evidence would be the one he opened to first, and whether—-
Kelly's phone rang.
"I need to take this," Kelly said, already rising. "Two minutes."
"Take your time."
Chelsea watched her assistant step outside, phone pressed to ear, one hand making a brisk gesture at no one in particular, Kelly's version of pacing, and she smiled to herself. She was getting better at reading Kelly. The brisk gestures meant it was work. The stillness meant it was personal. The particular angle of her jaw when she was trying not to laugh at something Chelsea had said meant—-
The hairs at the back of her neck stood.
It was the strangest sensation. Not a sound, not a shadow, not anything she could point to and say that's what alerted me. Just a shift in the air. A change in the quality of the space around her, the way a room changed when someone entered it carrying something heavy and invisible.
"Did you think you could avoid me forever?"
Chelsea already knew who it was before her stepmother took the vacant seat across from her.
Francesca.
She hadn't seen her in months, and the first thing Chelsea noticed, before the voice, before the words, before the familiar scent of the perfume Francesca had worn for as long as Chelsea could remember, something expensive and floral that had once smelled like home and now smelled like a room she'd been locked out of, was how much she had changed.
Francesca had always been beautiful. It was the first thing anyone said about her, and usually the only thing, because Francesca's beauty had a quality that discouraged further observation, the way a closed door discouraged entry. But the woman sitting across from Chelsea now looked like that door had been left open in a storm. The lines around her mouth had deepened. The skin beneath her eyes was bruised with sleeplessness. Her hands, resting on the table, were thinner than Chelsea remembered, the bones more visible, the rings looser on her fingers.
She had aged in the way people aged when bitterness was doing the aging for them, not gradually, not gently, but in concentrated bursts that left marks.
Chelsea's heart ached at the sight of her.
Even after everything, it ached. Because Francesca was the woman who had braided Chelsea's hair every morning before school for three years after her father died. Francesca was the one who had taught her how to set a table and how to write a thank-you note and how to walk into a room without looking at the floor. These were small things, and they were also everything, and the fact that Francesca had eventually become someone who tried to take Chelsea's inheritance while she lay unconscious in a hospital bed did not erase them.
It just made them harder to hold.
"Do you know why I'm here, darling?"
Darling. Francesca's endearment had never been warm, not exactly. It had always carried a slight edge, the way a velvet glove carried the shape of the hand inside it. But today it was sharper than usual, and Chelsea could hear the tremor underneath it, the vibration of something being held together by will alone.
Through the cafe's front window, Kelly had stopped dead in her tracks. Her assistant had turned back and was staring through the glass with an expression Chelsea had never seen on her face before, not disapproval, not composure, but something rawer. Something protective.
Kelly reached for her phone.
Chelsea shook her head.
It was a small gesture, barely a movement, but Kelly froze. Their eyes met through the window, and Chelsea tried to communicate what she couldn't say out loud: I'm okay. I need this. Please.