Chapter 3

I gripped the sheet and laughed at myself on the inside.

So that was why she'd come. Not because she thought I was dead, not because she'd missed me. She'd come to negotiate on behalf of her new boyfriend.

It landed like an open-handed slap, and it burned the same way.

I wanted to say something cruel. I wanted to ask her how she could do this. But the words turned somewhere between my chest and my mouth, because I couldn't stand to be the thing that ruined the life she'd built, and there was nothing I could give her anymore.

"All right," I said. "I'll settle. But I want to meet him first."

A week later she took me to a private club in the nightlife district.

The place was velvet and brass and dark glass, and it smelled like money. Back home she used to go red walking past a lingerie window, and now she crossed a room like that one without blinking.

She caught me looking around and smiled. "Don't tell me you've never been anywhere like this."

The private room upstairs was dim and thick with smoke, cigarettes layered under perfume, and it turned my stomach. Rideshare cars are non-smoking, and I'd quit years ago.

A man was holding court in the middle of it with three women draped around him. He didn't move a single one of them when Chloe walked in. If anything, he made a show of it.

His friends called out to her anyway. "Look who it is. The boss's girl."

Chloe stopped in the doorway, and her eyes went hot and wet.

She knew what Blake West was. She'd always known.

"Blake, I brought him," she said. "He's agreed to —"

"I've got eyes," he said, cutting her off without looking at her.

He nodded at me, and immediately two of the women peeled off and came to sit on either side of me.

"Go ahead, name it," Blake said. "Whatever you want. Money? Seventy-five thousand? A hundred and fifty? Something else? Women? A watch? A job back home? Keep your mouth shut and it's yours."

I looked over at Chloe, standing off to the side.

She looked wretched.

Blake followed my eyes, pushed the women off him, and came and stood over me.

"What's this? You've got a thing for Chloe?" He was grinning now, playing to the room. "Don't tell me you'd rather have her than the money."

Everyone laughed.

"She's a cheap little climber who threw herself at me," Blake said. "You know how many men she had to work to buy me this watch?"

He took the Cartier off his left wrist and dropped it into an ashtray.

"That's what it's worth. If it didn't make her sick to see it there, I wouldn't put it on at all."

I kept my eyes down.

"If you don't want it, Mr. West," I said, "I'll take it."

Blake laughed once, backhanded a glass off the table, and it burst on the floor.

The room went quiet.

"Say that again," he said.

Chloe hurried over and took his arm, then turned on me.

"Blake hit you by accident. You're getting a settlement. Quit while you're ahead, take the money, and get out."

Her voice sharpened.

"And who exactly do you think you are, looking at me like that?"

Blake pulled his arm out of her hands.

"Don't put on a show for me," he said. "You think I don't know where your money comes from? You two are exactly the same."

Chloe walked me out afterward, biting her lip, tears sitting on her lashes.

"I'm sorry," she said. "I had to talk to you like that in front of him."

She caught my hand and sighed.

"I know how he sounds, but he's good to me. Everything I'm wearing came from him."

Then she gave me a small, careful smile.

"I know I'm shallow about money. You don't think less of me, do you?"

I shook my head and let out a breath.

I couldn't blame her. I was never going to be able to give her the life she wanted, and if she'd fallen in love with someone who could, whose fault was that but mine? I just wasn't strong enough.

That's still how I was thinking, right up until the next morning, when a man walked into my hospital room and told me Chloe had been playing me.

"You do know what she is, right?" he said. "The whole thing is an act. She's after your money."

I stared at him.

"She got me too," he said. "Eighty thousand in a single year. That's what she does. She finds a man, she gets him to look after her, and she moves on to the next one."

He pulled a stack of photographs out of his coat and threw them onto the blanket.

Chloe, in every one of them, with a different man.