Chloe
The flight back to LA feels longer than the one out, mostly because I’m so excited to get home.
I’ve got my forehead against the window for most of it, watching the country roll by thirty thousand feet below, a patchwork of lights and dark stretches that eventually gives way to the sprawl of Los Angeles glittering out to the horizon.
The trip was definitely worth it. The writer of Better Days Ahead, Leonor Alvarado, is a kid just out of college, living in a semi-basement in Jersey City and struggling to make it as a writer.
This is her big break, and her excitement when we met to talk through the film was infectious in the best way, the kind of energy that makes you remember why any of this matters.
And New York, as always, was a good place to spend a few days.
Between meetings I walked through Central Park and ate too much good food and thought about how strange it is that two cities can both claim to be the center of the world and feel so completely different from each other.
But still, I missed Tristan more than I thought I would. Every text from him over the past few days gave me a burst of energy, keeping me moving.
The private car is waiting at the curb when I come through the arrivals doors, and I slide into the back seat, letting out a long breath as we get moving.
I glance at my phone as we drive, hoping to see a message from Tristan, but the screen is disappointingly blank. He hasn’t responded to many of my texts since yesterday, and I’m sure he must be swamped with work.
Guess I’ll just have to distract him a bit.
I grin privately to myself, replaying the way he kissed me goodbye, my shoulders against the wall and his hands in my hair.
He took his time with it like he had something to prove, and butterflies tumble through my stomach at the memory.
After that send-off, my welcome home is going to be something.
The house is dark when we pull up, just the porch light on and the windows unlit except for a faint glow coming from the back.
I thank the driver, grab my suitcase, and wheel it toward the front door.
The familiar scents of the house—clean linen, the ocean breeze, and a hint of Tristan’s cologne—greet me, and I inhale deeply.
“Tristan?” I call out, flicking on the light by the door. “Hey, I’m back.”
There’s no answer, so I set my bag down and move through the foyer, glancing around the room. The tall windows are dark, the ocean beyond an inky expanse into the night. I make my way into the living room, where everything looks as it should, cozy and welcoming. But still, there’s no sign of him.
There’s a light on under the door at the end of the hall, so I head that way. I push his office door open, smiling as I catch sight of him at his desk.
“Hey, there you are. Did you hear me calling? I’ve been texting you since—”
“Why did you do it?”
His voice stops me cold. It’s quiet, flat and contained, and my stomach drops before I quite know why. I stop just inside the doorway and look at him properly.
He’s leaning back in his chair, a glass of whiskey on the desk in front of him, his jaw tight, his eyes fixed on me with an expression that turns the butterflies in my stomach into rocks.
The smile slides off my face.
“Do… what?” I frown, taking a step toward him. “Tristan, what’s going on? You’ve barely texted since yesterday and now you’re sitting in the dark with a whiskey, what—”
He doesn’t answer directly. His gaze hardens, settling somewhere past me.
“I can understand why you’d marry me to benefit your family’s business,” he says, his voice cold enough to make my skin prickle.
“That’s not new. People do it all the time.
I can even understand stealing company secrets.
You’re certainly not the first to try something like that. ”
He pauses, and when his eyes come back to mine they’re flat and hard. “But what I can’t figure out is why you’d go to so much trouble to pretend this was real. Why act like you were falling for me when it was all just a lie? Why make me believe in something that wasn’t true?”
My pulse spikes hard enough that it hammers in my throat. “I have no idea what you’re talking about.”
“Someone accessed Thorne Enterprises’ servers.
” He stands suddenly, moving around the desk, his shoulders tight.
He crosses his arms over his chest, glaring at me with a closed-off expression that makes him look like a stranger.
“Downloaded our entire expansion strategy. Market reports, client lists, everything we’ve been building toward for the past year.
The breach was traced to your computer. Your login credentials, your office, your machine. ”
My jaw drops open. “What? That’s not possible.”
“IT traced it twice.” A muscle in his jaw works. “The files were sitting on your desktop. I went to your office myself and checked.”
“You went through my office?”
“I needed to see it with my own eyes.” He reaches into his jacket pocket, pulls out a folded piece of paper, and sets it down on the desk between us. “And I found this.”
I cross the room and look down at it, and the floor tilts underneath me.
My handwriting. My notepad. My words, written months ago in those first ugly weeks when I was still treating this whole arrangement like a chess match and him like the opponent sitting across the board.
It’s a marriage of convenience, nothing more. Don’t forget that Tristan Thorne is the enemy.
My breath catches in my throat. I remember writing this. I remember hating myself even as the ink dried, knowing even then that the words weren’t fully true, that they were armor I was putting on because I was scared of exactly what ended up happening, which is that I fell for him completely.
I stagger back slightly. My chest is tight, my face hot, and the room feels smaller than it did a minute ago.
“I wrote that months ago,” I say, my voice shaking. “Before the wedding. Before I knew you. Before any of this became what it is now. It… it doesn’t mean anything. I didn’t mean it, not even while I was writing it.”
“The files were on your computer, Chloe.”
“I didn’t put them there.” I shake my head urgently. “I didn’t steal anything from you. I swear to you, on anything you want me to swear on, I did not do this.”
He doesn’t have a response to that, but I can tell from the set of his shoulders that he doesn’t believe me. This is the same man who held me while I cried about Spencer, who told me I was the strongest woman he knew—and right now, he’s looking at me like he doesn’t know me at all.
“Someone must have used my computer,” I say, my voice climbing, my hands moving without my permission.
“Someone who had access to my office, who knew my login, who wanted it to look like it came from me. I don’t know who or how, but there has to be another explanation, because I would never do this to you. I would never.”
“The evidence says otherwise.”
“Then the evidence is wrong!” My voice cracks on the last word and I hate it, hate that I’m shaking with my own handwriting sitting on the desk making me look like exactly what he thinks I am.
“I know I can’t prove it. I know how it looks.
But I’m asking you to believe me anyway. Just trust me. Please.”
He holds my gaze for a long, terrible moment. “Why should I?”
The question cuts right through me so sharply that I almost gasp.
“Because I’m your wife.”
His expression goes flat. “That doesn’t mean anything. We both know what this is.”
Those words land like a knife between my ribs, and I gape at him, tears welling in my eyes before I can stop them.
With shaking hands, I slip my wedding ring off my finger.
I stare down at the jeweled band in my palm for a heartbeat, unable to let it go.
This thing that I’ve worn every day for months.
This thing that stopped feeling like a prop such a long time ago, somewhere between the engagement party and the kitchen counter and the night he told me he wanted this to be real.
You have to, I tell myself.
I pull myself together, my jaw set and spine rigid as if the stiffness of my posture can hold my emotions together.
“If that’s what you really think,” I say, my voice breaking badly in the middle of it, “after everything—if you really believe I could do this to you… then we’re done.”
I set the ring down on his desk next to the note. The flash of pain that crosses his face hurts to look at, but I make myself turn away. I can’t stay here, not with this between us.
I walk out of the office. My feet carry me down the hallway and I don’t look back, not once. My vision is blurry and the hallway swims in front of me, but I find the front door by instinct and pull it open and step out into the night air and keep walking.
“Chloe!”
His voice calls out from the doorway behind me. I don’t stop. I walk down the front path with my arms wrapped tight around myself, my bare feet hitting the stone cold and rough beneath me, not thinking about anything except getting as far away from this house as possible.
The iron gate latch is cold under my hand. I march through the gate at the end of our—Tristan’s—driveway until I reach the edge of the road, the night air cool against my tear-streaked face, the asphalt rough under my bare feet.
My driver already left. I’m not about to go back inside and take Tristan’s keys. I probably shouldn’t be driving anyway, not when I can barely see straight.
Fuck it. I’ll walk. I’ll call a fucking cab.
“Chloe!”
His voice is closer now, tight with something I don’t have the capacity to figure out right now.
I pull my arms tighter around myself and keep moving, my feet finding the edge of the road.
I start to cross it, needing to be somewhere that isn’t here, somewhere far enough away from Tristan’s house that I can breathe again.
My ears start to ring.
The buzzing comes on fast, that high-pitched sound cutting through everything, drowning out the sound of my harsh breaths until there’s nothing but static pressing in on both sides of my head.
The world turns muffled and strange, that underwater quality I’ve come to dread, and I shake my head but keep walking.
Tristan’s voice reaches me through the ringing again, muffled and distant, the words swallowed by the static filling my ears.
And then his voice changes. Even through the ringing, even through the thick pressing silence, something cuts through. A tone I’ve never heard from him before. Pure, raw terror.
“Chloe! Watch out!”
I look up.
A car is barreling toward me, its headlights blazing white and huge—close, so terrifyingly close, with no sign of stopping. I’m standing in the middle of the road, stuck, and I don’t have time to do anything at all.