Chapter Ten #3
The driver was waiting in the same black sedan.
He opened the door for her without speaking and closed it with the solid, expensive thud of a vehicle that had been engineered to keep the world at a distance.
The drive back to her apartment took twenty-two minutes.
She spent them staring out the window at the familiar streets—the campus, the coffee shop where she had met Allie last month, the bar where she had first let Caleb buy her a drink—and seeing them as if from a great height, as if she had already left this version of her life behind and was only waiting for the rest of the world to catch up.
Her phone vibrated in her purse as the sedan pulled into the apartment complex parking lot. A text from Caleb. Is it done?
She typed her reply without pause, without hesitation, without the faintest tremor in her thumb. Done.
She did not answer the second message. The one that came three minutes later, when she was already inside her apartment with the door locked and the blinds drawn.
The one that said I'm sorry and then, after a pause, Can I come over later.
She read it once, deleted it—the habit was automatic now, bone-deep—and set the phone face down on the kitchen counter.
The physical discomfort was manageable. A low, dull ache that reminded her of bad periods, the kind she had suffered through in high school with Advil and a heating pad and the grim determination that she would not let her body dictate what she could accomplish.
The quieter thing settling under her ribs was not pain. It was clarity.
She had carried Caleb Caldwell's child for a matter of weeks.
She had erased it in a single morning because his mother paid her to do so.
The transaction was complete. The evidence was gone—the tests would be in a gas station trash can by evening, the forms at the clinic would be sealed behind layers of privacy law, the check would be deposited into the secret account where it would join the other money she had been quietly accruing for years.
Allie still wore the ring. Allie still occupied the house and the future and the version of Caleb that performed commitment in public. Allie still believed Kenzie was her closest friend.
Kenzie stood in front of the bathroom mirror and studied her own face the way she might study a document that required careful parsing.
Dark hair falling in soft waves past her shoulders.
Sharp cheekbones that showed no trace of exhaustion, no shadow of grief, no evidence that the morning had been anything other than ordinary.
The face in the mirror was the face she had always worn—the face that photographed well and lied better, the face that had learned to smile at exactly the right moments and never a second before.
She had always known she wanted more than the role she had been given.
Since childhood, since the first time she had seen the way wealthy women moved through the world—the easy confidence, the unexamined entitlement, the assumption that their comfort was a natural law rather than a purchased privilege.
She had watched them the way a cartographer watched new territory, mapping the customs and the customs and the soft, unguarded places where a blade could be inserted without resistance.
The pregnancy and its swift, paid removal had simply sharpened the wanting into something colder and more specific.
She did not want a baby. She had never wanted a baby—not now, not with Caleb, not in the life she was still building.
What she wanted was the life that had been arranged for Allie Hargrove.
A life that had been arranged since childhood, since the two families had first recognized the strategic value of an alliance bound by blood rather than contract.
She wanted the easy money and the protected future and the man who would never have to face consequences as long as his mother remained willing to write checks.
She wanted Allie's life. And she intended to take it.
Kenzie picked up her phone from the counter and opened the most recent group chat she shared with Allie.
The last message was from three days ago—Allie asking if she wanted to get coffee this weekend, a casual invitation extended with the guileless warmth of someone who still believed friendships were built on affection rather than strategy.
Kenzie had not responded yet. She had been waiting for the procedure to be finished, for the transaction to be complete, for the final variable to lock into place.
She typed a message now. Cheerful. Warm. The exact tone Allie expected from her, the exact rhythm of their hundred previous conversations.
Yes! Been so busy with midterms, I need a break. Monday? The place on Hillsborough.
She added a string of emojis—the coffee cup, the laughing face, the pink heart that Allie always used in her replies—and hit send. Then she set the phone down and looked at herself again in the dark screen. The smile she gave her reflection was small, private, and completely empty of warmth.
Across town, Allie Hargrove still believed the walls of her life were solid.
She still believed her fiancé was faithful and her best friend was loyal and the future that had been arranged for her was the future she actually wanted.
Kenzie intended to take every piece of it. And she would do it while smiling.