Chapter 23 #2
She nodded, a smile tugging on her lips.
Sean went on: “Plus, you need to know you’ll always come third after music and Richard.
He’ll disappear for weeks, on some niche adventure.
You know he missed my thirtieth because he suddenly had to see some three-thousand-year-old trumpets they found in Tutankhamun’s tomb?
” They shared a laugh at this because it was so John.
But beneath the laughter Chloe felt a private stab of pain because she didn’t know if she had the words to make it right.
Yet the version of him that Sean was describing—the man who got lost in his own obsessions, who moved through the world with quiet conviction and peculiar joy—that was what she wanted.
She wanted someone with his own interests, passions, a view of the world that was different from her own.
She loved that John lived life in the footnotes, tucked between the lines, always curious, never needing the spotlight.
But the horror on his face last night still haunted her. What if she had missed her chance?
“Well, good luck,” Sean said, patting her on the back. “I gotta run. I’ve got a taxi taking me to Heathrow.” He kissed her on the cheek.
She smiled. “Safe flight back to LA. Don’t be a stranger.”
“I’ll call you,” he said.
Once he’d gone, Chloe turned back toward the chapel. Music was still playing as people lingered by the entrance. She walked through the main door, then peered around the screen to see the organist—but it wasn’t John, it was a young female student.
A new urgency seized her. She sprinted to the porter’s lodge, breath ragged in her throat, eyes darting over the list until she found his name.
Room fourteen. She bolted again, across Grove.
Katie and Amara called to her, but she didn’t stop, she kept running, up the far stairwell two steps at a time, heart pounding with something that felt like hope and dread tangled together.
She reached his door, barely pausing to knock, only to find it already ajar.
The bed was made. The towel neatly folded on the chair.
He’d gone. Her stomach dropped. She was too late.
A flush of heat spread across her chest, prickling at her skin, chasing cold fingers of panic up the back of her neck.
She pressed her palms against her face, trying to hold herself together.
She knew she could call him, but the fact he’d left early without saying goodbye felt horribly significant.
With heavy feet, she walked back to her room. Rob had packed their belongings, stripped the bed, and cleaned the surfaces. He stood by the window, dressed in a fresh shirt and blazer, patiently waiting. She had not seen it before, but in this light, he looked like a giant Ken doll.
“Hello. Are we leaving now?” he asked plainly, and she nodded. She didn’t like seeing him like this—so, well, robotic.
She slipped the watch back onto her wrist, reached for his arm, and powered them on together. She needed him to be at full capacity for the journey home. Her watch turned blue, then gray.
“You are unhappy, Chloe,” Rob observed, as the screen on his wrist flickered to mirror hers, with a gray line.
The empathy returned to his expression, his eyes pooling with a new depth of emotional intelligence.
“What can I do to cheer you up?” he asked, and now he was Rob again.
It dawned on her that maybe the humanity in him had always been her. She was the ghost in the machine.
“I’m fine. We should go get the bus,” she said.
Rob nodded as he picked up their bags. She followed him out of college in a daze.
Part of her just wanted to let him comfort her, hold her, tell her it was all going to be okay.
This urge reminded her of giving up smoking, the lure of nicotine, calling her back whenever life got hard.
But she knew it would be a quick fix, not the one she needed.
Looking around at people walking through Oxford, she felt a nagging dread about the future, about what the world would look like when everyone had a Rob. But then, seeing the glow of a screen lighting up every face, she wondered if they already did.
On the bus, she scanned the seats for John, for Richard, but they weren’t there.
Rob sensed her misery but could do nothing to help.
Chloe leaned her forehead against the cold glass of the bus window, replaying last night’s conversation with John.
Then she straightened her spine, held her head high, a new confidence settling over her.
He was right about one thing—she had everything going for her, she’d just been looking at her life through the wrong lens.
As the bus pulled away from the curb, Lorna Childs stood up and asked the driver if she could borrow his microphone. Then she moved to the center of the aisle to address everyone.
“What a weekend!” she said, pausing for a few cheers.
Chloe looked around the bus at all these happy, smiling faces.
“I know everyone probably needs to sleep for a week,” Lorna went on, “but before we leave, I wanted to thank Elaine and the alumni crew for all their hard work, and Gary the coach driver for putting up with us today. As for you guys”—she waved her arm around the bus—“I feel so blessed to call you all my friends. And anyone who doesn’t follow me already on Instagram, it’s @LornaInspires. My DMs are open—”
Before she realized what she was doing, Chloe found herself getting out of her seat, walking down the aisle, and holding out her hand for the microphone.
“I have something I want to say too,” she said.
She must have said it forcefully because Lorna looked mildly terrified, then handed her the mic midsentence.
Chloe clasped it with both hands, planting her feet to steady herself as the floor swayed with the motion of the bus.
“I want to tell you all that I am a liar,” she said, turning to face her peers. “And if this was the Olympic Games of lying, I’d be going home with the gold.”
There were a few nervous laughs as everyone waited for the punch line.
“I am a fraud,” she said. Now the laughter stopped.
Chloe’s mouth went dry. She dropped a hand to her side, clenched and then flexed it.
“When the invitation for this reunion came through, I didn’t want to come.
I thought my life was an embarrassment compared to the rest of yours.
I don’t have an impressive job; I spend my days booking medical procedures for my boss, then cold-calling film financiers.
It’s not glamorous. It’s not well paid. It’s certainly not the job I dreamed of when we graduated. ”
She scanned the rows of faces, her eyes landing on Thea, who was looking back at her with open confusion.
“I am single,” Chloe went on. “I live with my parents, and I was ashamed. I thought it was my fault that I’d failed to find a partner, that I wasn’t good enough.
Rob is not my boyfriend, he’s someone I asked to come along and support me this weekend, because I couldn’t face coming alone.
I didn’t want you to see that the girl you voted most likely to succeed hadn’t succeeded in anything.
” She tightened her grip on the mic, reaching out to steady herself as the bus rounded a corner.
“But what I’ve realized this weekend is that I got it all wrong.
Success isn’t a job title or marital status.
It isn’t about money or who brings the most attractive date.
It’s about being a decent human, a good friend, and being honest enough to put your hand up and say: I don’t have it all figured out yet.
” She raised her hand, then immediately regretted it, because now she had to awkwardly lower it.
She cleared her throat, pushed her hair out of her eyes. “That’s all I wanted to say.”
Chloe passed the mic to Lorna and walked back to her seat.
There was a long, stunned silence. Lorna stared at Chloe, eyes glassy, her mouth opening and closing, like a fish gasping for air. Then, from the back of the bus, Mark Patel stood up, flattening the kink in his dark hair with a palm.
“My life isn’t perfect either,” he said, clearing his throat.
“I am proud of my career, but it came at the expense of everything else. I was in love with someone—a boyfriend who wanted a future with me—but I was always working. He left. And this weekend, seeing so many of you with partners, families, actual lives, it’s made me question whether all the professional success is worth what it cost me. ”
The coach fell still. Then Alan Crest stood up, running a hand through his thinning blond hair.
“I’m on probation at work,” he said nervously.
“I made a serious error. I sent an all-company email with this photo attached, it was on my hard drive by mistake, I don’t know how it got there…
I haven’t slept properly in weeks. I started taking sleeping pills and now I can’t sleep without them.
” He glanced toward Mark, then Chloe, offering a small nod of solidarity.
“I didn’t pass the bar exam,” Harriet blurted suddenly, standing with eyes already brimming. “I failed twice and that’s why I gave up on law. It wasn’t because I wanted to stay home and make jam and cheese. I don’t even make the cheese, someone else does, I just take the photos for Instagram.”
One by one, people started popping up like whack-a-moles; everyone had something to confess.
Chloe had set off a bus full of honesty dominos.
Colin Layton admitted he was drowning in debt after borrowing too much to build a dream house he couldn’t afford.
Nisha Anand confessed she regretted having children so young—how she hadn’t even known who she was before she became a mother.
Rocco Falconi stood on his seat and, to a ripple of awkward laughter, told everyone he had erectile dysfunction.