That was the thing Rhea couldn't swallow. Not that Chelsea was rich now, or married, or living the life Rhea had mapped out for herself. It was that Chelsea hadn't even tried. She hadn't strategized or positioned or dressed for it or done any of the things Rhea had been told mattered. She had just been herself, and apparently that was enough, and the unfairness of it, the sheer senselessness of a world that rewarded accidental warmth over calculated effort, was enough to make Rhea's vision blur with fury.
Her hand found her phone under the counter. Her fingers moved over the screen with the sharp intensity of someone who had been waiting for an outlet and had finally found one.
She was unaware of how her older colleague had been studying her from the other end of the desk.
Amanda knew that look. She had worn a version of it herself, once, ten years ago, when this job had still been new enough to wound her. Back then, she had been like Chelsea, all smiles, looking at everyone with rose-colored glasses. But because this job had her dealing daily with people who were rich and full of ego, her bruised pride had eventually made her bitter, and Amanda had ended up mirroring the very people who had hurt her in the first place.
She had feared for her job when she found out the girl she'd dismissed on that first morning was actually the boss's wife. But instead it was as if nothing had happened, and whenever there was a chance, Chelsea would greet Rhea and her like they were friends.
Genuinely like they were friends.
Not the way rich wives greeted staff, with a smile that saidI see youwhile their eyes saidI see through you. Chelsea greeted them the way she greeted everyone: like they were the most interesting person she had encountered that day, and the greeting was not a formality but a small gift she was offering without any expectation of it being returned.
Amanda's unease grew as she watched the emotions playing over the younger woman's face. Rhea's jaw was set, her eyes narrowed, her thumbs jabbing at her screen with a viciousness that went beyond venting.
"Everything alright, Rhea?"
"Everything's fine." Rhea didn't even look up, her expression rigid with fury as she continued to type.
She's just ranting,Amanda thought uneasily. Girls who were Rhea's age loved to rant. They'd fire off messages to their group chats, get it out of their systems, and move on.
Could it?
Afternoon came, and Chelsea remained cheerfully unaware of the resentful envy she had unknowingly stirred as she left with Kelly for their next engagement.
The luncheon with the board members' wives had gone well. Better than well, actually, and Kelly was still trying to make sense of it.
Because Chelsea had done it again. She had walked into a room full of women who had spent decades perfecting the art of the strategic lunch, women who could fillet a reputation over a Caesar salad and smile while doing it, and Chelsea had done the one thing Kelly had explicitly told her not to do.
She had been herself.
She had asked the chairman's wife about her garden. Not the estate, not the new wing they'd built, but the actual garden, the one the woman tended herself on weekends, the one nobody ever asked about because it wasn't impressive enough to mention at these things. And the chairman's wife, a woman Kelly had watched reduce junior executives to tears with a single raised eyebrow, had talked about her tomatoes for twenty minutes with the kind of unguarded happiness that Kelly had never once witnessed in three years of working with these people.
Kelly had spent fourteen years learning the rules of these rooms. Which topics were safe. Which compliments landed. How to navigate the invisible hierarchy of who spoke first and who laughed at whose jokes. She had built a career on understanding these systems, and Chelsea Cannizzaro had walked in and rendered all of it beside the point by the simple, completely unteachable mechanism of actually caring.
You couldn't train someone to do what Chelsea did. You couldn't put it in a briefing document or a bullet-pointed email. You couldn't schedule it or strategize it or reproduce it. It was just her, being her, and the rooms kept surrendering, and Kelly kept watching it happen with the quiet vertigo of a woman realizing that the rules she had spent her career mastering might never have been the point.
Kelly had confirmed it had gone well with a single nod, which in Kelly's vocabulary was the equivalent of a standing ovation, and Chelsea had glowed, and Kelly had looked away because the glowing was doing something to her professional objectivity that she was not yet ready to name.
They arrived ten minutes early at the cafe, a place with exposed brick and trailing plants and the kind of atmosphere that made Chelsea suspect a single coffee here could pay for a week of groceries. She had ordered a chamomile tea and was watching the steam curl above it in a way that probably looked contemplative but was actually just her thinking about the book she'd given Olivio this morning and wondering if he'd started reading it yet, and whether the green tab she'd placed at the passage about the manuscript evidence would be the one he opened to first, and whether—-
Kelly's phone rang.
"I need to take this," Kelly said, already rising. "Two minutes."
"Take your time."
Chelsea watched her assistant step outside, phone pressed to ear, one hand making a brisk gesture at no one in particular, Kelly's version of pacing, and she smiled to herself. She was getting better at reading Kelly. The brisk gestures meant it was work. The stillness meant it was personal. The particular angle of her jaw when she was trying not to laugh at something Chelsea had said meant—-
The hairs at the back of her neck stood.
It was the strangest sensation. Not a sound, not a shadow, not anything she could point to and saythat's what alerted me.Just a shift in the air. A change in the quality of the space around her, the way a room changed when someone entered it carrying something heavy and invisible.
"Did you think you could avoid me forever?"
Chelsea already knew who it was before her stepmother took the vacant seat across from her.
Francesca.
