Chapter 20 #2
A corner of his mouth lifts slightly. "I'm kind of terrible at casual."
The words land hard enough that I feel myself go still.
Not because they surprise me, they don't. Because some part of me has already been standing in that truth without saying it out loud.
Jonah's eyes shift to me.
I let out a breath and fold my arms loosely across myself, suddenly aware that both of them are waiting for my answer. “I let him reorganize parts of my bookstore,” I say. “We are very clearly past casual.”
Jonah looks at Callum for a long moment. Then he exhales a short, deliberate sound through his nose, like a man releasing something he's been holding for longer than tonight.
“I figured,” he says. “Since Callum started hovering around this place every chance he got and you suddenly developed opinions about his haircuts.”
I don't say anything to that. Neither does Callum.
"Okay," Jonah says.
I don't say anything else, and I don't have to, because my face is apparently doing it without my permission and my brother has been reading it since before I knew how to stop him.
He makes a small sound in the back of his throat that isn't quite a laugh, something softer than that, and I feel the specific relief of being known by someone who has always shown up for me even when I've made it difficult.
“We should go,” I say, reaching for my bag behind the register. “We were about to head to Callum’s before you showed up anyway.”
Jonah nods. “I figured I’d probably end up there eventually,” he says.
“Yeah, before you accidentally mediate us into a shared retirement account,” I say.
“I support financial planning,” Jonah says.
Callum picks up his keys from the counter. “Good. Because I’m apparently terrible at casual and now aggressively long-term.”
I move around shutting down the last of the lights and the bookstore shifts into shadow section by section until only the front lamps are still glowing against the windows.
I kill those too and head for the door. Jonah waits while I lock up, testing the handle out of habit once I slide the deadbolt into place.
We step out onto the sidewalk together.
The night air hits cool against my skin, carrying the ocean dampness in off Harbor View, and for a moment the three of us just stand there — Jonah on my left, Callum on my right, the street quiet in a way it rarely is.
A month ago I would've been standing here trying to figure out how to handle it alone.
For the first time all evening the tension in my chest loosens enough that I think maybe we're finally leaving this night behind us.
Then my phone goes off.
I glance at it out of reflex and Callum's goes a second later.
The particular quality of two notifications arriving at the same moment is different from one.
The photograph fills the screen.
Callum and I are on the rooftop terrace, the city behind us, mid-conversation, the frame doing exactly what it's meant to, which is to make two people look like they're the only ones in it.
I know when it was taken. I know what had just happened before it was taken.
Asking for a friend: what does a bookstore owner have to offer a billionaire besides a great story? #WhosBenefiting.
Cordelia had been treating us like a foregone conclusion for so long that the photograph felt less like evidence and more like proof she'd been annoyingly right.
"Maureen Pike," I say.
“Fantastic,” Callum says. “Love when my personal life gets a coordinated media rollout.”
Within the next four minutes, the notifications don't stop. I watch the repost patterns, the comments, the way the framing of the caption does its work before anyone thinks to ask whether there's another interpretation. There's not.
It's fast, organized. The hashtag is already seeded into three other accounts I don't recognize, the same photograph, the same caption, staggered by minutes as if someone had them queued.
We'd spent months rebuilding trust in this town. Maureen was trying to do the opposite in a single night.
Jonah takes my phone and I don't reach for it back.
Callum is still, which I understand now as the version of him thinking several moves ahead.
I pull up the local broadcast because someone in the thread has linked it, and there is Maureen Pike in a recorded segment.
She's not speculating, she's talking about Callum, the investigation, the fire, the pop-up arrangement, the gala.
All laid end to end in the particular order that makes each thing imply something else, turning the bookstore's remediation crisis and the gala into leverage.
I hit pause, then drag the timeline back ten seconds and let it play again. Maureen keeps talking, steady and confident, like she owns every word coming out of her mouth. I tap the counter with my knuckle in time with her sentences, then stop because it is getting under my skin.
"Play that again," Jonah says.
"I am," I say, even though I am already rewinding it.
Callum steps in beside me and braces a hand on the counter, watching the screen without saying anything.
Maureen says his name again. I watch the way she builds the sentence around it, where she places it, what she pairs it with. I reach out and pause it right there.
"No," I say, more to myself than to them.
"What," Jonah asks.
I shake my head and scrub a hand over my mouth, then hit play again and let it run. "Listen to how she's stacking it," I say. "She opens on Callum, but she doesn't stay there. She keeps pulling it back to the store, to the permits, to the timeline."
Callum shifts beside me. "It looks like she's trying to tie everything together with the photograph and posts she's been sending out this past month," he says.
"She's redirecting it," I say, and I point at the screen when Maureen pivots back to the bookstore. "If this were about you, she'd stay on you. Your history, your money, your name."
"In fairness," Callum says, "those are all very usable headlines."
Jonah looks between us. "So what's she doing?" he asks.
I let the clip run another few seconds. "This is about me. But why?"