The summons came just after breakfast, delivered by a housemaid whose quiet deference only amplified the sense of dread curdling in Chloe’s stomach.
“Mrs. Finch requests your company for a walk in the rose garden, Ms. Jones.”
Chloe managed a smile that felt brittle enough to shatter. “Of course. Thank you.”
The morning had been a study in exquisite torture. After the kiss—the dizzying, world-tilting, utterly catastrophic kiss—Alistair had reverted to his default state: Dr. Finch, the academic automaton.
At the breakfast table, he had discussed the migratory patterns of monarch butterflies with his aunt for a full ten minutes, never once meeting Chloe’s eyes. He had barricaded himself behind a fortress of facts and figures, leaving her stranded in the messy, emotional wasteland he had created between them.
His withdrawal was a physical ache in her chest, a stark reminder that to him, she was a business transaction, and the feelings that had ambushed them in the garden were nothing more than an inconvenient variable to be analyzed and dismissed.
Now, she had to face the queen lioness in her den.
Chloe smoothed the skirt of her simple linen dress, a garment chosen for its inoffensive elegance. She felt like a defendant about to face a judge who held the power of life and death over her business, her future.
Caleb’s interrogations had been like dodging sniper fire—dangerous but direct. A walk with Matilda, she suspected, would be like navigating a minefield, where every pleasantry could conceal a hidden charge.
She found Matilda Finch by a trellis heavy with climbing roses, their petals the color of a blushing dawn. Dressed in a cream-colored cashmere cardigan, the matriarch was snipping away deadheads with a pair of silver secateurs, her movements precise and economical.
She looked up as Chloe approached, and her eyes, the same piercing blue as her grandson’s, held a calm, appraising quality.
“Chloe, my dear. Thank you for joining me.”
Her voice was like fine gravel, smooth but with a definite texture. “The morning sun is the best time for the roses.
They haven’t yet decided to wilt from the effort of being beautiful.”
“They’re stunning, Mrs. Finch,” Chloe said, her voice steadier than she felt. This was her stage.
She was a professional.
“Please, call me Matilda.” She offered a small, thin-lipped smile and gestured down a crushed stone path that wound deeper into the garden.
“Walk with me.”
Chloe fell into step beside her, her hands clasped nervously behind her back. For a few minutes, they walked in a silence punctuated only by the crunch of their shoes and the snip-snip of Matilda’s shears as she paused to discipline a stray bloom.
The air was thick with the scent of damp earth and a thousand different floral notes, a perfume so rich it was almost overwhelming.
“This garden was my husband’s great folly,” Matilda began, her gaze fixed on a particularly vibrant crimson rose. “Arthur had no sense for business. He had a sense for joy, which is a far more expensive commodity.”
Chloe braced herself. The interrogation was beginning, cloaked in nostalgia.
“It’s a beautiful legacy.”
Matilda gave a soft, dry chuckle.
“He would have called it a beautiful mess. Our marriage was… unconventional.
My father was horrified. He thought Arthur was a feckless dreamer who would bankrupt me within a year.”
“Was he?” Chloe asked, before she could stop herself.
“Utterly,” Matilda said without a hint of regret. “He was also the most brilliant, passionate man I ever knew.
He taught me that the most worthwhile things in life rarely fit into neat little boxes. They’re often messy.
Inconvenient.” She paused, turning to look directly at Chloe, her blue eyes seeming to see right through the carefully constructed facade.
“Passion, especially, has a dreadful habit of ignoring contracts and schedules.”
The word ‘contracts’ landed like a stone in Chloe’s gut. It was a random choice of word.
It had to be. But the directness of Matilda’s gaze suggested otherwise.
Chloe’s professional calm began to fray at the edges. She felt a flush creep up her neck.
“I suppose that’s true,” she managed, her voice a little too tight.
Matilda turned back to the path. “Alistair takes after my side of the family.
Orderly. Logical.
He believes any problem can be solved if you simply research it thoroughly enough.” She snipped a perfect white rose from its stem and handed it to Chloe.
Its thorns had been neatly removed. “He sees the world as a library, a collection of facts to be catalogued and understood.
He’s always been more comfortable with the dead than the living. The dead, you see, are so wonderfully predictable.”
Every word was a perfectly aimed dart. Chloe felt her defenses crumbling, not from a direct assault, but from this slow, methodical dismantling of the man she was pretending to love.
Matilda wasn’t questioning Chloe’s story; she was questioning the very plausibility of Alistair being a part of any story like it.
“He’s… methodical,” Chloe agreed, choosing her words with care.
“It’s one of the things I admire about him. He’s steady.”
“Steady, yes,” Matilda mused.
“A rock. But a rock doesn’t sparkle, my dear.
And for the past decade, my grandson has been a rock.” She stopped and faced Chloe again, her expression softening into something less assessing and more… knowing. “Until you.”
Chloe’s breath hitched. “I’m not sure what you mean.”
“Oh, I think you do,” Matilda said gently. “At dinner the other night, when Caleb was being his usual predatory self, Alistair didn’t retreat into his shell.
He watched you. He watched you spin that lovely, ridiculous story about meeting at a symposium on medieval manuscripts, and there was a fire in his eyes I haven’t seen since he was a boy arguing that dragons were biologically plausible.”
The blood drained from Chloe’s face. She remembered that moment—the frantic energy, the relief as her story landed, the fleeting look of pure, unadulterated awe on Alistair’s face before he’d masked it.
She had chalked it up to his gratitude. Matilda had seen something else entirely.
“Yesterday, at the croquet match,” the old woman continued, relentless. “He was clumsy, of course.
He always has been. But he wasn’t embarrassed.
He was laughing. I cannot recall the last time I saw Alistair laugh like that—a real, uncalculated laugh, right from the belly.”
Matilda took a step closer, her voice dropping to a conspiratorial whisper. “He seems more alive than he has in years.
Less like a curator of history and more like a man who is actively living it.”
The observation hung in the air between them, shimmering with unspoken meaning. It was the most generous, and most terrifying, thing anyone had said all weekend.
It wasn’t an accusation; it was a statement of fact. A fact that proved their deception was working, but for all the wrong reasons.
They had set out to fool the family into believing in a relationship, but the real change Matilda had noticed was in Alistair himself. A change Chloe knew was inextricably linked to the very real, very messy feelings that had culminated in that kiss.
Chloe looked down at the thornless white rose in her hand, a perfect, curated thing. It felt like a prop.
“He makes me happy,” she said, the lie tasting like ash in her mouth because it was so dangerously close to the truth.
Matilda’s smile was enigmatic. “Of course he does, dear.”
The tone was placid, but the implication was clear: that part, I don’t believe for a second.
The matriarch seemed to decide the conversation was over. She patted Chloe’s arm, a gesture that felt both like a benediction and a dismissal.
“Enjoy the gardens. I must go consult with the cook about dinner.
We wouldn’t want the salmon to be overdone. Order is so important in a kitchen, don’t you find?”
And with that, she turned and walked back toward the house, her posture as straight and unyielding as a poplar tree.
Chloe stood frozen on the path, the scent of roses suddenly cloying, suffocating. The carefully constructed walls of her professional persona had been breached, not with a battering ram, but with a quiet key she hadn’t even known Matilda possessed.
The matriarch hadn’t asked a single question about their history, their future, or their feelings. She hadn’t needed to.
She had simply held up a mirror, not to Chloe’s performance, but to Alistair’s soul, and showed Chloe exactly what she had done to it. And in doing so, she had revealed that she saw everything.
She might not know the specifics of the contract, the business, or the inheritance, but she knew the heart of the matter: something was fundamentally different, and Chloe was the catalyst.
An unnerving certainty settled over Chloe. Matilda Finch knew their relationship was a fabrication.
And for some unknowable reason, she was letting it play out. The thought was infinitely more terrifying than an outright accusation.
It meant they weren’t just actors in a play for a passive audience. They were specimens in a jar, being observed by a shrewd, patient scientist who was waiting to see what they would do next.