Chapter 2 ~ The Transformation

They took my apartment key on the first day, which should have frightened me more than it did. Instead I felt something closer to relief, one less thing tying me to a life that had already stopped being enough to keep my father alive.

"You'll live at the estate starting tomorrow," Mia said, walking me through a townhouse she'd rented for the transition period, sterile and beautiful in a way that felt more like a stage set than a home. "For now, we work here. Voice, posture, memory. You have three weeks to become someone the most powerful families in this country will look at and see nothing wrong."

The voice coach came first, a small, exacting woman named Renata who made me repeat the same sentence forty times until the vowels sat differently in my mouth, flatter, colder, the practiced boredom of someone who'd never had to want anything badly in her life. "Isabelle doesn't ask for things," Renata said. "Isabelle expects them. Say it again."

The posture came next, then the walk, then four hundred pages of a life I had to memorize as though it were my own, boarding schools in Switzerland, a horse named Cassius that died when Isabelle was twelve, a childhood best friend who'd since become a senator's wife, a favorite color that changed depending on which interview you referenced, a habit of touching her left earring when she lied.

I studied every photograph they gave me until I dreamed in Isabelle Ashworth's face instead of my own.

On the fourth night, unable to sleep, I went looking for water and found Mia's office door slightly open, light spilling into the hallway. I shouldn't have looked. I looked anyway.

A file sat open on her desk, not the file I'd been given, a different one, thinner, marked with a red tab that read ASHWORTH PRIVATE. I caught only a few words before I heard her chair shift and stepped back into the shadow of the hallway, heart pounding. Enough words, though. Enough to read, last known location and not considered a missing persons case and, worst of all, a single typed line near the bottom I couldn't stop replaying: Family has requested no further inquiry into I.A.'s condition.

Condition. Not whereabouts, not location. Condition, like something medical, like something final.

I didn't sleep at all that night. I lay in an unfamiliar bed memorizing a stranger's childhood and wondered, for the first time with real fear instead of curiosity, whether the woman whose face I now wore in the mirror each morning was actually still alive somewhere to complain about it.

By the second week, I could sign Isabelle's signature without looking. I could recite her family tree faster than my own. I'd learned to hold a wine glass the way she did, from the stem, never the bowl, a detail so small it shouldn't have mattered and somehow became the thing I practiced longest, alone, in front of a mirror that no longer entirely showed me my own reflection back.

"You're a fast study," Mia said on the morning of the twelfth day, watching me cross a room in heels I'd never have chosen for myself, back straight, chin level, every motion drilled into muscle memory that used to belong only to a paintbrush. "Faster than the others."

I froze mid-step. "The others?"

Something closed over in her expression, quick and final, the door of a conversation she had no intention of finishing. "Focus on the wedding," she said instead. "Everything else is not your concern."

But it was. It had become my concern the moment I read that file, the moment I understood there had been a version of this plan before me, and that whatever happened to that version was apparently not something Mia Stilio wanted discussed twice.

That night, my father called, his voice thinner than it had been the week before, more breath than words. "Where are you, sweetheart? You sound far away."

"I'm fine, Dad. I'm working. It's a good job." The lie came easier than it should have, and I hated myself a little for how naturally it settled into my mouth alongside Isabelle Ashworth's flattened vowels and rehearsed confidence.

"You always did throw yourself into things," he said, and I could hear the smile in it even through the phone, even through the effort each word visibly cost him. "Just like your mother."

My chest tightened. "You never talk about her."

A long pause, longer than the question warranted. "Not much to tell," he said finally, too carefully, the same careful tone Mia used whenever I asked a question she'd decided I wasn't allowed to have answered yet. "Get some rest. I love you."

He hung up before I could push further, and I sat alone in a house that wasn't mine, wearing a face that wasn't mine, holding a phone still warm from a conversation that had told me almost nothing and somehow changed everything.

I thought about calling him back, about asking outright why a dying man would rather guard a secret than spend his remaining breath explaining it to his own daughter. I didn't. Some part of me already understood that whatever he was protecting me from, he believed it was protection, and I didn't yet have the strength to find out whether he was right.

The wedding was in nine days. Tomorrow, Mia told me before she left for the night, I would meet Arlo Alfie for the first time, the man I was contractually, publicly, and within the week legally required to marry.

I lay awake a long time after that, running my thumb along the edge of a diamond ring three sizes too large for my actual hand, listening to an unfamiliar house settle around me, and trying very hard not to think about a file with a red tab and four words that wouldn't leave me alone.

Not considered a missing persons case.

At exactly 11:58 p.m., a car pulled into the estate's private drive outside my window, a full day early, headlights cutting sharp across the dark lawn, and Mia's voice rose sharp and urgent from downstairs, saying a name I hadn't expected to hear until tomorrow.

"Mr. Alfie. We weren't expecting you until"

The front door opened before she finished the sentence.

I stood frozen at the top of the staircase, one hand pressed flat against the banister, watching a shape move through the entryway below, tall, unhurried, entirely unbothered by the late hour or the alarm in Mia's voice. I couldn't see his face yet, only the dark outline of him against the porch light, and something in the stillness of his posture told me, with absolute certainty, that this was not a man accustomed to being kept waiting for anything, least of all an introduction.

Whatever composure I'd spent twelve days building suddenly felt paper-thin, untested against the one person in this entire arrangement whose approval or suspicion could unravel everything in a single glance.