11 - Jess
Jess
The musty weight of damp parchment settled in my lungs. My fingers brushed against the water-damaged edges of Constance’s correspondence, trying to flatten a page where the ink had bled into an illegible bruise.
My hands were steady, but the rest of me was a disaster. I was stuck in a feedback loop of steam and tiles. Of muscular bodies and a giant cock that had rendered me useless.
The logic was simple: I was spiraling.
That was the only explanation.
The wedding was a slow-motion car crash, and my subconscious had decided to cope by getting pinned in the shower by a man who looked like he’d been carved from a mountain.
It was a gorgeous lapse in judgment. Nothing more.
I looked down at the letter in my hand. Constance had been a suffragette, a woman of iron and public defiance, but her private papers told a different story.
These were the forbidden dispatches from ‘R.’ Letters that spoke of illicit touches in the back of dark carriages and longing that bypassed the brain and went straight for the marrow.
Carter tugged at my thoughts. Up until now, he was my great love story.
The man I’d spent three years convinced was my permanent North Star until he navigated right into Amberleigh’s bed.
He was a gentle lover. Considerate, polite, and left me feeling like I’d just finished a very pleasant cup of chamomile tea.
We had a real connection. We had shared goals and a future.
That mattered more than the all-consuming furnace Brock had ignited.
You don't build a life on the kind of sex that leaves your knees feeling like liquid.
You build it on the stuff I had with Carter before my ex-best friend turned into a homewrecker.
Constance and 'R' had risked everything for a touch. I was just risking my pride at a luxury fitness center.
Perspective. That was going to save me from this.
I dropped the archival brush and moved to my desk, the hum of the Smithsonian’s internal server the only sound in the gloom. David’s voice lurked somewhere in the gloom of bad decisions: Know your enemy.
The Instagram login page glared at me. I needed a ghost. A digital specter that wouldn't lead back to Jess Seymore, the girl who still lived in a basement. I typed Helen Salisbury into the name field, my fingers hovering over the keyboard as I tried to invent a life for a woman who didn't exist.
"Salisbury? Sounds like a woman who owns a lot of sensible cardigans and a prize-winning spaniel."
I slammed the laptop shut, the plastic casing making a loud crack in the silence. Walter flashed a knowing smile.
"It's a project I’m working on. Go back to your lair and let me work in peace, please," I said, my face heating up.
"You’re a terrible liar, Jess. Your pupils are dilated and you’re trying to hide a window from a man who has spent ten years spotting microscopic flaws in ancient artifacts.
" He nudged my hand aside to flip the screen back up. "You have to show me what you’re doing on company time or I’ll have no choice but to report you. ”
"I’m... verifying data. For work."
Walter snorted, pulling a rolling chair over with his foot. "Rule number one: never use a government-issued IP address for a digital hit job. You might as well leave a business card at the scene of the crime."
I slumped in my chair. "I don't have a burner phone, Walter. I have a grudge and a deep-seated desire to regain my dignity."
"Which is why you have me." He pushed his glasses up and smiled wide. "I’ve had to do this a few times. Research purposes, obviously. If you’ve reached the point where you’re creating Helen Salisbury, the situation is dire.
You’re the most level-headed person in this building.
If you’re breaking bad, there’s a reason. "
The word level-headed weaseled under my skin. If he knew how I’d begged a man to fuck me twelve hours ago, he’d never offer to help me. And he’d probably call to have me burned at the stake.
"It’s stupid," I said, reaching for the power button. "I’m being childish."
"You’re being human. It’s a foreign concept in this department, I know.
" He stood, checking the analog watch that seemed too large for his bony wrist. "But you’re also being an amateur.
If you do this here, IT will have a transcript of your descent into madness before you even hit the Follow button. "
I looked at the damp, gray walls of my kingdom. The basement felt too small, the air too thin, thick with the weight of Constance’s secrets and my own. I needed to move. I needed to be anywhere that didn't remind me of the girl who got cheated on or the girl who got wrecked in a shower stall.
"I’m not doing it," I said, reaching for my bag. "It’s beneath me. I have a life."
"You have a basement," Walter countered with a lanky grace. "I, however, have a private laptop in my lair upstairs with a dedicated VPN routed through a server in Estonia. It’s the digital equivalent of a clean room. No breadcrumbs. No prying eyes. Just you, the bride, and a secure connection."
He dangled the bait with a tilt of his head. He knew the pull of the itch. He knew that once the seal was broken on a mystery, a true archivist couldn't just walk away.
"Estonia?" I asked, my resolve beginning to fray at the edges.
"It’s lovely this time of year. Very private." He gestured toward the door. "Leave the relics behind, Seymore. Take an early lunch. I’ll get you set up, and then I’m going to go get a sandwich while you ruin your own afternoon in peace."
"This is unethical, Walter."
"The underpinnings of real friendship. And it’s much more productive than staring at a suffragette’s heartbreak."
I looked at the stack of 1920s longing on my desk, then back at Walter’s crooked glasses. The lure of the VPN was the final nudge I needed to abandon my dignity.
"Fine," I said, catching my strap. "But if I get fired, I’m telling the board you’re a sleeper agent who made me do it."
Walter’s lair was a refrigerated sanctuary of high-resolution scanners and ultraviolet lamps.
The air lacked the basement’s organic rot, but held the sterile, ionized zing of cooling fans and ozone.
Huge monitors dominated the workstations, displaying zoomed-in fractures of artifacts that looked like lunar landscapes.
He pulled a stool out for me at a desk cluttered with external hard drives and a half-eaten bag of salted pretzels. "Helen Salisbury sounds like she smells of mothballs. So we’re definitely killing her."
I sat, the plastic seat cold through my pants. "Fine. Gretchen?"
Walter adjusted his glasses, his gaze fixed on the screen. "The goal is to be the total opposite of yourself, but Gretchen’s a bit of a stretch, don't you think?"
I narrowed my eyes. "Jean."
"You wish."
I stood up, the legs of the stool scraping against the linoleum. "I didn't want to do this anyway. I have love letters to salvage."
"Wait, wait." He caught my sleeve, his expression shifting into a rare, apologetic softness. "I’m done. I'll stop. Let's try a different angle. We build the face first. The name usually finds itself once there’s a soul behind the pixels."
He clicked through a proprietary AI generator, the screen flashing with a montage of composite features. "Logic dictates the opposite of you. Black hair, a sharp pixie cut, brown eyes. And a banging bod."
"Oh, fuck off. My body bangs just fine."
He gave me a once-over, his eyes lingering on the curve of my hip before returning to the screen. "A few more months on that gym membership and that sentence might just be true."
Before I could find a retort, he hit a final key. A woman appeared on the screen. She was striking but generic, the kind of person you’d pass in a grocery store and forget within three seconds. She had ink-dark hair and a smile that looked like it belonged on a box of organic pasta.
"Susan Jeffries," I blurted out. The name felt right. Unremarkable, and entirely safe.
"Susan Jeffries it is." Walter’s fingers became a blur.
He populated a feed in seconds, pulling AI-generated images of rustic sourdough loaves, a cluttered mudroom, and a golden retriever sleeping by a fireplace.
"Susan is a homemaker from the Midwest. She has five kids, a husband named Greg who works in insurance, and a passion for slow-cooker stews.
She is the least threatening entity in the Western Hemisphere. "
He stood, gesturing to the keyboard with a dramatic flourish. The Estonian VPN was active, the digital trail cold.
"The reins are yours, Susan. Happy hunting."
The digital gate swung open, and Susan Jeffries was officially a silent witness to the glossy perfection of Amberleigh’s life.
The screen glowed with the blue-white saturation of the Mediterranean.
Amberleigh stood on the deck of a yacht, her skin bronzed to a polished honey, a glass of something sparkling in her hand.
The caption was a string of hashtags about blessed lives and sun-kissed memories.
My stomach curdled. I was a ghost in a basement while the woman who had gutted my life was sailing toward a sunset I’d only dreamed of.
"Wow," Walter muttered, looming over me until the heat of his shoulder pressed against mine. "The bride is a ten. And that yacht. Greece? I’ve been trying to justify a trip to Mykonos for three years."
I scrolled down, my thumb trembling on the trackpad. There, in the comments of a photo from a pre-wedding brunch, was the profile picture I’d spent a lifetime trying to forget. Carter. He’d liked the photo. He’d commented something sweet with a heart emoji. She’d replied.
They were still in touch. The betrayal wasn't a static event in the past; it was a living, breathing circle of friends that didn't include me. I was the casualty, the inconvenient history tucked away in the archives while they toasted to the future.
"Look at the architecture in the background of that shot," Walter was still going on, oblivious to the wrecking ball swinging through my chest. "The white-wash against the volcanic rock. It’s a masterpiece."
I slammed the laptop shut. "This was a mistake. A monumentally bad idea."
The buzz of my phone on the desk interrupted the spiral. A text from Marcus, my supervisor, appeared on the lock screen: Why aren't you in your office?
"Office," I muttered, gathering my things. "He calls that damp hole an office."
“Find what you were looking for?”
I glared at the closed laptop on Walter’s desk and sighed. “I think it’s time I stop looking.”
I retreated to the basement, but my sanctuary didn’t feel the way it was supposed to.
I stared at Constance’s letters, at the ink where she’d poured out her longing for ‘R’, and all I could see were the pixels of a yacht in Greece.
It was a cosmic injustice. Amberleigh had been the architect of a catastrophe, yet she lived a life of high-profile parties and international travel.
Consequences were a myth told to keep the good people in line.
I tried to focus on the cataloging, but all I could think about was Carter’s heart emoji and Brock’s hands all over me in the shower. The discipline of the museum was gone. I was a raw nerve, exposed and twitching.
By four, I gave up trying. No amount of historical preservation was going to save me from the noise in my head.
I emerged from the Smithsonian into the humid D.C. air, the sun beginning to dip behind the monuments. But I didn't go home to my quiet apartment. My body made the decision before my brain could veto it.
The glass doors of Capitol Fitness hissed open, the familiar roar of the cardio deck and the metallic bite of the weights hitting me square in the face. I told myself it was for the endorphins. I told myself I needed to sweat out the resentment.
Hunter was behind the front desk, his eyes sharp and unblinking as they locked onto mine.
"Don't say anything," he said. "Just take off your clothes."