Chapter 1 #2
“I’m just going to nip to the loo,” she said, picking up her bag.
“Knock yourself out,” Tom replied, already half turned back to the TV.
Chloe always tried to stay on a date for at least forty-five minutes.
Any less just felt too rude. But if she could tell, as she did now, that even forty-five minutes was going to be an endurance test, she allowed herself an extra-long bathroom break to sneak in a chapter of her book.
Glancing back at the table, she doubted Tom would even notice she was gone.
In the bathroom, Chloe glanced at her phone.
Her photo app had compiled a memory reel titled “On This Day.” The first image was of her and Peter lying on a sun lounger in Tenerife the year before.
She was curled into his chest, wearing just a bikini, squinting up at the camera.
He had one arm around her, and he was kissing her head as he took the selfie.
They both looked so happy. Peter would never have tried to watch the football game during a date; he was a stickler for manners.
He opened doors, he asked questions, he made eye contact.
She quickly closed her phone. This wasn’t helping, and those photos certainly didn’t tell the whole story. Instead, she climbed onto the old Victorian radiator next to the sink and pulled out Little Women—a safer kind of fantasy. The radiator let out a reassuring clonk sound.
“Yes, he is a bit of a clonk,” Chloe muttered.
“Clonk clonk,” said the radiator. And already, she was having a better conversation with the radiator than she’d been having back in the bar.
She was several pages into a chapter when she became aware of someone else entering the room. A striking woman with long, dark hair and pale, freckled skin was smiling at her from across the tiled floor.
“Chloe?” the woman said, eyes wide with delight. “Oh, I thought it was you!”
Chloe blinked. She couldn’t place her. “Wendy,” the woman offered, not the least bit offended.
“Wendy?” Chloe asked, eyebrows lifting in surprise.
Wendy had freelanced as a producer at McKenzie and Sons a few years back.
Chloe had liked her; she was bubbly and always brought home-baked biscuits to work on a Friday.
The only reason Chloe hadn’t recognized her now was because she looked completely different.
The Wendy she remembered was a bit, well, frumpy, with limp, gray-streaked hair and a permanently defeated posture.
This Wendy looked…radiant. Toned. Confident. She also looked ten years younger.
“I know, I know,” Wendy said, doing a twirl. “I made some changes.”
She moved to the sink and began washing her hands—slowly, with deliberate movements, lathering soap between her long, graceful fingers. Chloe caught sight of the smartwatch on her wrist: sleek, iridescent, clearly expensive.
“But what are you doing in here?” Wendy asked, watching Chloe in the mirror. “Are you avoiding someone?”
“Bad date,” Chloe admitted.
“Sleazy or boring?” Wendy asked, her tone light and knowing.
“Rude,” Chloe said.
“Poor love. How long have you been looking?” The question landed harder than Chloe expected, and she was struck by Wendy’s choice of words.
“Too long,” she said quietly.
“I know that feeling,” said Wendy, drying her hands on a paper towel with the same precision she’d used to wash them.
The bathroom was nicer than you might expect, given the decor in the pub: there was moisturizer as well as soap, and even a magnifying mirror for doing makeup.
Wendy took a moment to moisturize her hands.
Then she stepped forward and pressed a soft, clean hand over Chloe’s.
This tactile display of empathy pushed Chloe over some edge she hadn’t even known she’d been teetering on.
A sob rose unbidden as Wendy’s sympathy untethered the full weight of her loneliness, and she lifted a hand to her mouth, trying to keep it in.
“Sorry,” she said briskly. “I’m fine, it’s just one date, it doesn’t matter. I don’t know what’s wrong with me.”
“It’s not just one date, though, is it,” Wendy said, tilting her head, eyes trained on Chloe’s face.
“It’s the opportunity cost, the evening you don’t get back, the hope, the anticipation, the ‘what if?’ extinguished again and again.
It’s walking home deflated, wondering if you have the energy to do it all again.
It’s wondering if all men are awful, or if your standards are just too high. ”
“Yes. Exactly,” Chloe whispered, her voice cracking.
Wendy enveloped her in a long-limbed hug. It was so unexpected, but Chloe found herself leaning into it, breathing in the expensive scent of almond oil in Wendy’s hair. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d been hugged by someone other than her parents.
“Never apologize for wanting more,” Wendy said into her shoulder.
When she released Chloe from the hug, she turned to retrieve her handbag from the sink.
From an inner pocket, she pulled out a small gray business card, gilt-edged with a gold “PP” embossed in the center and a QR code below it.
“I’ve only got one of these left,” Wendy said, biting her lip as she passed the card to Chloe.
“What is it?” Chloe asked.
“It’s the future,” Wendy said. “Trust me, it will change your life, it changed mine.” She gestured toward her own reflection. Chloe raised an eyebrow.
“But what’s PP?”
“Perfect Partners. It’s a dating service,” Wendy said, lowering her voice. “But it isn’t like anything you’ve ever tried—”
Her phone buzzed and Wendy glanced at the screen and smiled. “Just coming, sweetie,” she said as she answered it, then quickly reapplied her lip gloss in the mirror, before turning back to Chloe. “You need a referral to get an appointment. Just give my name.”
Then she blew Chloe an air kiss, pressed a finger to her lips, and whispered, “Shhh, don’t tell the men.” Then she was gone, heels clicking against the tile, hair swishing behind her.
Chloe looked down at the card, intrigued. She pulled out her phone and scanned the QR code. A web page blinked open. The logo read Perfect Partners, the font sleek and futuristic. The home page was populated with images of incredibly attractive people. Underneath was a single line of text.
Looking for the perfect partner? Don’t wait for fate. Take happiness into your own hands.
The website gave no further details about what the company was offering, how to sign up, or what it cost. Just a number to call and a message: For inquiries, please call to book a consultation.
Whatever Perfect Partners was, she couldn’t find anything about it on Google.
She could only find something called Perfect Partnerz with a “Z,” which was a tacky adult website.
Whereas this looked exclusive, discreet, and like something Chloe definitely couldn’t afford.
But after seeing Wendy, she felt inspired—inspired not to waste another minute of her evening with Sausage Fingers.
Back in the bar, she returned to the table but didn’t sit down, she just picked up her jacket and said, “I have to go.”
“How come?” Tom asked, eyebrows knitted in incomprehension.
“Because I feel lonelier here with you than I would on my own.” She gave him a tight smile. “Oh, and I did mind that you were late and that you asked to swap seats. Enjoy the game.” Then she turned and she walked out the door without a backward glance.
—
When she got back to Richmond, the house was dark.
Her parents must have already gone to bed.
Her family home was a ramshackle sixteenth-century cottage, half-swallowed by wisteria, sandwiched between two grand Queen Anne mansions.
It looked misplaced on the street, as though the world had evolved around it but the house had stubbornly refused to budge.
Chloe loved that about it, and when she’d moved out of Peter’s, it was the only place she’d wanted to go.
Letting herself in, she crept through to the kitchen.
The dishwasher had finished, so she took a moment to empty it, then laid out a cafetière, bowls, and cutlery for breakfast. On instinct, she pulled a Post-it note from the phone table, scribbled FARTS BEAK, and stuck it to her dad’s chair.
They had taken to writing each other anagrams after reading an article that claimed it could help ward off dementia.
Upstairs, she sat down on her childhood bed and looked around at all the mementos of her youth.
The framed drama awards above her dressing table, the fake Oscar Sean had given her in first year.
Photographs of long-lost friends, their faces plump with youth.
She stood up and peeled one photo from the mirror—the Lincoln gang in their second year at Oxford, when they’d all still been close.
The four of them were dressed in costume for A Midsummer Night’s Dream.
Chloe had played Puck; Akiko, Titania; and Sean, Bottom.
John, their music director, wore a green velvet smoking jacket and a crown of ivy.
She looked at herself in the photo: nineteen years old, so full of confidence and conviction.
Back then, she’d been sure she was going to be an actress or a writer, that she would lead a creative, fulfilling life.
And that love, the kind you read about, would be just around the corner.
What would that girl think of the life she had now?
Whenever she felt unsettled about the future, or disappointed in the present, Chloe turned to the past. Reaching beneath her bed, she pulled out a dusty shoebox.
Inside were all the notes the Imp had ever sent—clues, riddles, and poems, all written in his distinctive, sweeping calligraphy.
She’d always known these notes were from her best friend, Sean, though he had never said it out loud.
These notes were her proof that someone could know you better than you knew yourself.
That there were kind, thoughtful men in the world, even if they weren’t in her life right now.
Flicking through the box, she found a ripped playbill for The Taming of the Shrew.
She thought back to that opening night, the night when everything had changed. What would she do differently now?
There was a gentle tap at her door and Chloe looked up to see her mother standing in the doorway wearing a dressing gown and fluffy pink bed socks.
“You’re back early,” she said, pushing her gray fringe away from her eyes. “He wasn’t a charming young man who whisked you off your feet, then?”
“Sadly no whisking and very little charming,” Chloe said with a weak smile. “The loo in the pub was nice though, so that’s something.”
“Oh that makes all the difference,” her mum said enthusiastically. “Did they have those little cotton flannels instead of the paper towels?”
“No, but they had moisturizer as well as soap.”
“Oh, well, it’s almost worth going just for that, then,” her mother said with a knowing nod. They shared a smile, and her mother came to sit down beside her.
“I’m beginning to think I might have terrible taste in men, Mum.”
Her mother laughed and squeezed her hand. “That’s not true.”
“It is. At uni, I always fancied the arrogant rugby boys who wouldn’t give me the time of day. I overlooked the nice suitable men who actually liked me.”
“Well, rugby boys have got those lovely thighs,” her mum said, and Chloe leaned her head on her shoulder.
“I wasted two years with Peter,” Chloe said quietly. “Everyone could see he was bad news, except me.”
“Weak men don’t like strong women. You saw through him eventually, love,” her mother said, hugging her close.
“I just don’t trust myself anymore, Mum. I don’t trust my instincts.”
Her mother reached for the threadbare teddy that sat on Chloe’s pillow. He had once belonged to Chloe’s grandmother Valerie, and something about him—perhaps the tilt of his stitched brow—exuded the same air of intelligent mischief that his previous owner had possessed in spades.
“Don’t listen to her, Aloysius,” her mother said, covering the bear’s ears with his paws.
Chloe smiled, reaching for him. He had faded fur; loose, frayed stitches; lumpy stuffing; and scratched glass eyes that gave him a look of worn-out wisdom.
Peter had never liked him, had refused to have “the manky bear” in their flat.
But to Chloe he was a treasured possession—imbued with nostalgia for her childhood and the warmth of her grandmother, a link to a time before she even existed.
“It might take you a little while to see when something’s wrong,” her mother said softly.
“But when it’s right? Trust me, you’ll know.
Life isn’t a race. Everyone gets where they need to go in their own time.
” She leaned forward and kissed Chloe’s head.
“Right, I’m off to bed, I haven’t done my Wordle yet.
” With a glance at the open shoebox, she added, “Don’t stay up too late reminiscing.
You can’t live in the past, you know, only the present, maybe the future. ”
Her mum blew her a kiss, said good night, then quietly closed the door behind her. Once she was gone, Chloe pulled the Perfect Partners card from her bag. Wendy did say it was the future. She turned it over in her hand, running a finger along the thick edge.
“What do you think, Aloysius?” she asked the bear. “Is some secretive, high-end dating service going to be the solution to all our problems?”
She shook Aloysius’s head for him. “No. I didn’t think so either.
Shall we look for cute 1950s hats on Vinted instead?
” Aloysius nodded. He was a bad-influence sort of bear, but he was old enough to know that scrolling for hats was much more enjoyable than scrolling for men.
And that indulging her nostalgia for fashion was probably safer than reminiscing about the contents of that shoebox.