Old Friend, New Distance

( Josephine's pov)

I called Marlowe eleven times before anyone bothered to pick up.

I want that number on the record, because later, when people ask why I didn't push harder sooner, I need somebody to understand that I did push. Eleven calls over six weeks. Four texts that said nothing but thinking of you, because I'd learned the hard way that anything more specific got read out loud to an audience I didn't trust. Two emails to an account I knew for a fact she barely checked anymore, since her actual inbox had somehow become something Thorne's assistant "helped manage."

We were roommates for four years at Wharton. I was in the room when she got the call about Meridian closing, and I screamed loud enough that the RA came to check on us. I stood up at her wedding and gave a toast that made her cry the good kind of tears, the kind I'd give anything now to know I'd actually earned.

Eight months after that wedding, HR called to tell me my position had been "restructured," effective immediately, security escort to my desk to collect my things, please. No clear reason given. A severance generous enough to buy my silence, if silence had ever been something money could buy from me.

It isn't. I'm just apparently the kind of person who spends six weeks getting sent to voicemail by her own best friend's phone.

I tried again on a Tuesday, mostly out of habit by then, phone wedged between my shoulder and my ear while I made coffee I didn't even want, already drafting the voicemail in my head before the ringing had properly started.

Somebody picked up on the third ring.

"Jo." Thorne's voice, warm as ever, easy as ever the voice of a man who has never once in his life had to work for anyone's good opinion. "What a nice surprise."

My stomach dropped straight through the kitchen floor.

"I was calling for Marlowe."

"She's resting, I'm afraid. Long day." A pause, just long enough to sound thoughtful instead of rehearsed. "Actually, Jo, I'm glad it's you. I've been meaning to reach out."

"About what."

"About Marlowe." Softer now, the register men like Thorne shift into right before saying something meant to sound like it costs them. "I know you two are close. I know how much she values you. That's exactly why I think you should know she hasn't been herself lately. It's been a difficult few months. I'd hate for you to be blindsided if she says something that doesn't quite follow."

"What kind of something?"

"She gets confused sometimes. Dates, conversations. Small things, mostly. Her doctor's optimistic, it's stress-related, nothing permanent, but I didn't want you hearing something concerning her directly with no context."

I stood in my kitchen holding a coffee mug I'd forgotten I was even holding, and felt something in my chest twist slowly, uglier by the second because here's the thing nobody warns you about when someone you love starts vanishing behind a story someone else is telling about her. The story is always built well enough that some small, exhausted part of you starts wondering if maybe you're the one getting it wrong.

"She sounded fine the last time we talked," I said, which was true, though the last time had been almost two months ago, a fact that landed on me like a physical weight the second it left my mouth.

"Two months is a long time," Thorne said gently, and I understood, with a cold little click behind my sternum, that he knew exactly how long it had been. He'd been counting.

In the background of the call, faint, I caught a voice I recognized and hadn't expected Beatrix, low and pleasant, saying something I couldn't fully make out. Two words did carry clearly, though, in that unhurried, honeyed tone of hers: “...her father's arrangement…; a phrase that snagged on something old in the back of my memory, some half-forgotten rumor from my first year at Ashcroft Holdings about a debt nobody would ever discuss on the record, and then was gone before I could grab hold of it properly.

"I thought you said it was a quiet night in," I said, before I'd fully decided to.

A fraction of a pause. Barely anything. If I hadn't spent four years learning to read this man's silences across a dinner table, I'd have missed it completely.

"Beatrix stopped by. She does that." Smooth again, instantly. "She's wonderful with Marlowe. Honestly, it's been a comfort having her so involved."

I asked to speak to Marlowe directly. He told me, kindly, regretfully, that she'd already gone up to bed, that he'd have her call tomorrow, that he really was glad we'd talked, that it meant a lot to him knowing she still had people like me in her corner.

Even now. Like she was already something spoken about in the past tense. Like the woman I'd known for a decade had already been quietly filed under “before“.

She didn't call the next day. Or the day after that.

I sat with it exactly one more week, doing the thing I do best under pressure, which is nothing visible at all no confrontation, no accusation, just careful, methodical waiting while I made a single call to an old contact from my Ashcroft days, someone in records who owed me a favor from a lifetime ago, and asked her, as casually as I could manage, whether anything unusual had come across her desk lately involving Marlowe's shares.

The silence on the other end lasted a beat too long.

"Jo." Careful, in a way that told me everything before she said a single specific word. "You didn't hear this from me. But you might want to look into a Section 12 filing from last month. Proxy authorization. Not public yet, but it will be."

I asked whose name was on it.

"Thorne Calloway's," she said. "For all of Marlowe's dormant voting shares. Signed off by the full board. Including her father."

I stood there with the coffee going cold in my hand and made the decision I should probably have made six weeks and eleven unanswered calls earlier.

I was done waiting for someone to let me back into that house.

I was going to find another way in.