PROLOGUE
CLAIRE
The lipstick is called Unbothered.
Which is hilarious, because my hands are shaking so badly that I’ve just drawn a crimson line from the corner of my mouth to somewhere near my left nostril, and I have never been less unbothered in my entire twenty-five years of existence.
I wipe it off with the back of my wrist, take a breath, and try again like a woman who’s about to go on live television and talk about her cookbook without sweating through her top or forgetting how sentences work.
The car is coming soon to pick me up at eight. I’ve been ready since seven because that’s what I do when I’m nervous. Then I stand in front of the mirror and convince myself I’m about to ruin everything, which is a fantastic use of the extra hour.
Black pants, tapered at the ankle. An off-the-shoulder top in deep purple that I bought specifically for today because it saysI’m a professional author who has her life togetherand notI’m a woman who ate cereal over the sink at midnight and watched three episodes of a baking competition she’s already seen twice. My hair is blown out, curled at the ends, pinned on one side. My glasses are off, contacts in, and the world has that slightly too-sharp quality it always gets when I’m not wearing frames.
I press my lips together, and the color holds.
“Today is going to be incredible,” I whisper to myself.
My chest tightens, not painful, not yet, just that familiar pressure behind my sternum that tells me the day hasn’t started and my body has already decided it’s a threat. I press two fingers to the base of my throat and count. Four in. Hold. Four out.
The bathroom tiles are cold under my bare feet. I haven’t put my heels on yet because if I put them on too early, my ankles will start to ache and then I’ll be thinking about that instead of the interview, and my brain can only hold so many catastrophes at once.
“Louis?” I call out toward the hallway, turning to check my profile in the mirror, tugging the hem of my top down where it’s ridden up. I walk out of the bathroom and into the living room. “Did you move my bag? The one with the book copies? I left it by the?—”
I stop.
The room is wrong.
Not wrong in a way anyone else would notice. The couch is the same, as is the coffee table with my stack of Post-it notes and the half-drunk glass of water from last night, and morning light is cutting in through the blinds. But there’s a suitcase by the front door. A black hard-shell, the expensive one Louis uses for client shoots. Standing upright with the handle extended, ready to roll.
Louis is sitting on the arm of the couch, dressed not for the studio but in jeans and the button-down shirt I pressed for him last night and hung on the bedroom door. His hair—short, brown, and slightly messy on top—swept off his forehead the way it falls when he’s freshly showered. He flicks the front piece out of his eyes with two fingers, that gesture I used to find attractive and now realize I’ve watched a thousand times without ever once seeing him clearly. The man is beautiful.
His keys are in his hand. Not on the hook by the door, but held loosely, casually.
“What’s with the suitcase?” I ask, and my voice comes out shaky. The adrenaline that was supposed to be for the interview has nowhere to go, so it splits itself between my chest and my stomach and sits there, heavy.
He stares at me with no smile or his usual warmth. Just this flat calm I’ve never seen before, and I realize with a sickening lurch that he’s been sitting here waiting for me. “Claire, doll.” He says my name the way a doctor says it before bad news. “I need to be honest with you.”
“About what?” My knees soften.
“I’ve been trying to convince myself I could make this work with you. That if I just gave it more time, or tried harder, I’d feel what I’m supposed to feel.” He pauses. Wets his lips. “But we’ve been together for a year, and I can’t keep pretending. You’re not my true Omega match. I think I’ve known that for a while, and it’s not fair to either of us to keep lying.”
The room tilts around me. “What do you mean?” The words come out fast.
“I deserve to find my real match, Claire. I owe myself that. And honestly? I think you deserve to be with someone who doesn’t have to try so hard to make it feel right.”
“You’re doing this now?” My voice cracks, and I hate that. “You couldn’t have mentioned this last night when we sat on this couch and talked about you joining me at the studio?”
“I didn’t want to throw you off before the?—”
“Before the what, Louis? The live television interview I have in less than an hour? This is your idea of not throwing me off? Oh my God!”
He sighs as if I’m being difficult. “I knew you’d react like this.”
“Like a person finding out her fiancé is leaving her in the morning with a packed suitcase?” My voice is rising, and I feel my pulse in my teeth. “When did you even pack? When I was asleep?”
He just shrugs. “Been slowly packing over a few days.”
A car horn bleats from outside. One short, impatient tap.
