That hit me somewhere I hadn’t expected. Margaret Wells, with her church hats and her warm smile and the way she had looked at me the one time Pauline brought me to visit—like she was seeing something in me that I couldn’t see myself. She had made me feel welcome and told me to come back anytime.
“I didn’t know,” I said.
“Now you do.” Claudette uncurled from the couch and stood, looking down at me with an expression caught somewhere between love and warning. “Jack, you’re my brother and I will always love you. But Pauline is my family too. If you hurt her again?—”
“I won’t.”
Claudette studied me for a long moment. Then she sighed, reached up, and patted my cheek the way she used to when we were kids and she was pretending to be the older sibling.
“Don’t make me regret telling you,” she said.
She walked out of the room without looking back.
The penthouse was too quiet when I got there. Too big. Too empty.
I poured myself a drink and sat in my study, watching the afternoon light creep across the floor.
Pauline Wells.
Her name had lived in the back of my mind like a splinter I couldn’t quite dig out.
I had dated other women since her—but none of them had ever made me feel the way she did. None of them had ever looked at me and seen something beyond the money and the name and the expectations.
Pauline had seen me. The real me. And for a while, I had let myself believe that was enough.
I remembered the first time I really noticed her. Not as Claudette’s friend, or as a guest in our house, but as *Pauline*.
It was at a summer party during her freshman year. Everyone was out by the pool performing for each other—showing off their wealth and connections. And there she was, curled up in a lounge chair with a thick paperback, completely oblivious to all of it. Completely unimpressed.
I had fallen for her like a man stepping off a cliff. The descent was slow enough to be terrifying and too fast to stop.
She made me laugh. Made me think. And definitely made me want to be better than I was.
A better man than my family expected and the spoiled rich kid everyone assumed I would become.
When I was with her, I felt like I could be anyone. Do anything. Like the weight of my last name didn’t have to define me.
And the way she talked about the things she loved…
True crime. She’d been obsessed with it—podcasts, documentaries, those thick books about serial killers she devoured like novels. I used to tease her about it, ask if she was planning to murder someone and needed tips on getting away with it. She would roll her eyes and throw a pillow at my head and then spend the next two hours explaining exactly why the Golden State Killer case was the most fascinating criminal investigation of the twentieth century.
I hadn’t cared about any of it. Not at first. But I cared about her, and that meant I cared about the things that lit her up from the inside.
One night—it must have been junior year, she had shown up at my apartment with her laptop and a bag of popcorn and announced that we were watching a documentary about a cult in Oregon.
“A cult,” I’d repeated, skeptical.
“Trust me.” She’d already made herself comfortable on my couch, feet tucked under her, laptop balanced on her knees. “It’s fascinating. They had a fleet of Rolls-Royces. Like, ninety of them.”
“That does sound like a lot of Rolls-Royces.”
“Right? Now shut up and watch.”
So I had. I’d sat beside her in the dark with the laptop screen flickering between us, watching her face more than the documentary—the way her eyes went wide at the revelations, how she leaned forward during the tense parts, the way she whispered “I knew it” under her breath when a twist confirmed her suspicions. Somewhere around hour three, she’d fallen asleep against my shoulder, her curls tickling my chin, and I’d stayed perfectly still for another forty minutes because I didn’t want to wake her.
I finished the documentary without her. Then I watched two more.
By the time she woke up, I was deep in a Wikipedia rabbit hole about cults, and she’d laughed at me for an entire minute straight.
