Chapter 15: " Final Notice"

Clover showed up at my apartment on a Saturday with a bottle of wine and a smile that didn't quite reach her eyes.

I almost didn't recognize her at first. Not literally, of course, but there was something different in the way she carried herself lately, a brittleness underneath the usual warmth that I'd been too distracted to notice until it was standing on my doorstep holding cheap merlot like a peace offering. We'd been best friends since our first week of law school, the two of us bonding over terrible coffee and worse professors, and in all that time I couldn't remember her ever showing up unannounced before.

"Girls' night," she announced, letting herself in before I'd fully opened the door. "You've been ignoring me for a walking soap opera and I refuse to let you forget I exist."

I hadn't been ignoring her exactly. I'd just had very little bandwidth left over for anything that wasn't Carter-shaped. Still, guilt pricked at me as I let her in, watching her drop onto my couch like she owned it, kicking off her heels with a sigh that sounded more tired than the moment called for.

She looked thinner than I remembered, though I couldn't have said when exactly that had happened, and there were faint shadows under her eyes that no amount of concealer had quite managed to hide. I made a mental note to ask her about it later, filed it away with a dozen other things I kept meaning to circle back to and never quite did.

"How's the eviction from your own sanity going?" she asked, already pouring two glasses without waiting for an answer.

"Slowly. Painfully. With excellent catering."

She laughed, but it came a beat too late, a beat too sharp. I noticed it and let it go, the way I'd been letting a lot of things go where Clover was concerned lately.

"The office pool is still running, you know," she said, curling her legs beneath her on the couch. "Three hundred dollars is now closer to eight hundred. People have strong opinions about your love life, Mia. Stronger than they have about their own jobs, apparently."

"Tell them to invest that energy into actual work."

"I would, but half of them would rather bet on which twin proposes first." She said it lightly, but her eyes tracked me over the rim of her glass in a way that felt more like measurement than teasing. "Must be a nice problem to have. Two men, unlimited money, an entire company just handed to you because they wanted your attention."

"It doesn't feel like a gift, Clover. It feels like being trapped in a very expensive fishbowl."

"Sure," she said, and something brittle moved behind the word before she smoothed it back over with a smile. "Must still be nice, though. The fishbowl."

"How's the new apartment treating you?" I asked, mostly to change the subject, though I realized as soon as I said it that I couldn't actually remember the last time she'd mentioned it.

"Fine," she said, too quickly. "Small. You know how the market is right now."

"You could always crash here if the commute gets annoying."

"I'm fine, Mia." There was an edge to it this time, sharp enough that I actually blinked, and she seemed to catch it herself, softening almost immediately. "Sorry. Long week. Client stuff."

I let it go, the way I always did with Clover, because pushing had never gotten me anywhere with her before, and because I had my own storm to weather without borrowing someone else's.

"Kade sent me flowers today," I told her, mostly to fill the silence. "No card. Just knew I'd know they were from him."

"Of course he did." Something flickered across her face, gone as fast as it came. "Must be nice."

"What?"

"Nothing." She took a long sip of wine, avoiding my eyes. "Just, must be nice having two billionaires fighting over which one gets to spoil you rotten. Some of us are just trying to make rent."

The words came out light, teasing even, but there was an edge underneath them I hadn't heard from her before. I opened my mouth to ask if everything was okay, if there was something going on with her I didn't know about, but she was already moving on, already refilling her glass, already steering us back toward safer, shallower ground.

"So," she said, forcing brightness back into her voice. "Tell me everything about the bookstore date. Don't leave anything out."

I hesitated, some instinct telling me to steer us elsewhere, but the wine had loosened something in me too, and it had been so long since I'd had anyone to actually talk to about any of it who wasn't somehow tangled up in the mess itself.

I told her most of it. Not the part about Kade almost confessing something before Killian interrupted. Not the part about the promise he'd asked me to make. I told her the soft parts, the easy parts, the parts that made a good story, and she listened with her chin propped on her hand and a smile that looked increasingly like it was being held in place by force.

Later, after two more glasses of wine, she excused herself to the bathroom and left her phone face up on my coffee table.

I wasn't trying to look. I really wasn't. But a notification lit up the screen, impossible to ignore from where I sat.

Final Notice: Payment Overdue. Immediate action required to avoid legal proceedings.

My stomach twisted. I hadn't known. In all the months of Clover checking in on me, asking about my day, listening to me spiral about two identical billionaires, I hadn't once asked how she was actually doing underneath the easy laughter.

She came back a minute later, scooping the phone up without meeting my eyes, tucking it face down beneath a couch cushion like it had never existed at all.

"Everything okay?" I asked carefully.

"Perfect," she said, and smiled so wide it looked like it hurt. "Now pour me another glass. I want to hear about the red dress."

I poured it, and I told her, and I laughed in all the places she wanted me to laugh, and the whole time some quiet, uneasy part of me kept circling back to that notification, unable to shake it loose. Final Notice. Legal proceedings. Words that didn't belong anywhere near a woman who spent her days billing four hundred dollars an hour and complaining about her commute.

After she left, well past midnight, I sat alone on my couch with the empty wine bottle between us like a third guest who'd overstayed his welcome, and thought about how easy it was to miss the people closest to you drowning, simply because they'd gotten so good at treading water where you could see them smiling.

I told myself I would ask her about it properly, soon, once things with the twins had settled into something less chaotic. It was, in hindsight, exactly the kind of promise a person makes right before she runs out of time to keep it.