The silence in the Finch family library had become a living entity. For the past day, it had followed them from room to room—a thick, suffocating blanket woven from the memory of a garden kiss and the awkward, stumbling retreat that followed.
Alistair had sequestered himself here, his natural habitat, ostensibly organizing a shelf of 19th-century botanical texts. In reality, he’d been staring at the same gilt-edged spine for an hour, the words blurring into meaningless patterns.
Chloe found him there, standing stiffly by the window, the pale evening light casting his silhouette in shades of grey. She had come for a book, or at least that was the excuse she gave herself.
The truth was the quiet was driving her mad.
“Are you planning on cataloging the entire collection before we leave tomorrow?” she asked, her voice softer than she intended.
Alistair didn’t turn. “It’s a more productive use of my time than… other things.”
The barb, subtle as it was, landed with precision.
Productive. Logical.
Everything their kiss was not. Chloe’s patience, already frayed by a day of stilted pleasantries and another panicked email from her business partner, finally snapped.
“We can’t keep doing this, Alistair,” she said, stepping further into the room. The scent of old paper and leather polish filled her lungs.
“We can’t just pretend it didn’t happen.”
He finally turned, his face a mask of detached academic curiosity that she now recognized as his most formidable armor. “On the contrary, I believe pretending it didn’t happen is the most logical course of action.
It was an anomaly. A procedural error.”
“A procedural error?” Chloe repeated, a bubble of incredulous laughter escaping her.
“Is that what you call it? I thought it was called a kiss.”
“It was an unplanned, emotionally-driven action that falls outside the parameters of our agreement,” he stated, his tone as dry as a footnote. He adjusted his glasses, a nervous tic she’d come to know well.
“A symptom of prolonged proximity and elevated stress levels. The literature on situational intimacy is quite clear on the phenomenon.”
Every word was a brick, rebuilding the wall between them he’d so briefly let crumble. It wasn’t just the coldness that hurt; it was the clinical dismissal, the way he was trying to file away the most breathtaking moment of her recent life into a dusty academic folder labeled ‘Anomalies.’
“The literature?” she echoed, her voice rising. “You kissed me, Alistair.
You. Not a case study.
And I kissed you back. Don’t you dare try to footnote that.”
“I’m simply trying to understand it,” he countered, his voice tightening. “To contextualize it so we can move forward and complete the objective.”
“Our objective is to convince your family we’re in love! For a genius, you seem to be forgetting the most crucial detail.
That kiss was the most convincing thing we’ve done all weekend.”
A muscle twitched in his jaw. “And that, precisely, is the problem.”
He took a step closer, his eyes intense behind his lenses. “Your entire profession is predicated on performance.
You are paid to be charming, to be convincing, to manufacture the exact emotional response a situation requires. You did it at the dinner table with Caleb.
You did it during the croquet match. You do it for a living.”
The accusation hung in the air, cold and sharp. He wasn’t just questioning the kiss anymore. He was questioning her, her entire identity, reducing her skills—her empathy, her intuition, her genuine ability to connect with people—to a cheap theatrical trick.
“What are you saying?” she asked, her voice dangerously quiet.
“I am saying,” he said, his own voice losing its academic calm and gaining a raw, fearful edge, “that you are an expert at simulating affection. It’s the service you provide.
So how can I possibly be expected to differentiate between a genuine response and a masterful performance designed to secure your fee?”
The cruelty of it struck her with physical force, a slap of ice-cold air. He had taken her greatest strength and twisted it into a weapon to use against her.
To protect himself. He’d found her most vulnerable point—the fear that clients saw her as just a transaction—and pressed on it with all his might.
The hurt was a sharp, stabbing pain in her chest, but beneath it, anger began to boil. Hot, righteous anger.
“You think I kissed you like that for the money?” she whispered, her disbelief warring with her fury.
“I think it’s a variable that cannot be discounted,” he shot back, clinging to his detached vocabulary like a life raft. “You needed a cash infusion.
You were quite clear about that. This is a high-stakes contract for you.”
“You bastard,” she said, the words coming out low and venomous. She saw him flinch, but she didn’t care.
He deserved it. “You absolute, heartless bastard.”
“It is a logical conclusion, Chloe!”
“No, it’s a cowardly one!” she retorted, her voice finally breaking free, echoing slightly off the book-lined walls.
“This has nothing to do with my job and you know it. This is about you.
This is about the fact that for one second in that garden, you felt something you couldn’t control, something that wasn’t in one of your dusty old books, and it terrified you.”
She advanced on him, jabbing a finger toward his chest.
“You are so terrified of anything you can’t dissect and label that you’d rather believe I’m some kind of sociopathic actress than admit the simplest, most obvious truth in the world: that what happened between us was real.”
“Real?” he scoffed, but his composure was cracking, his face pale.
“We have a contract, Chloe. A business arrangement.”
“We had a business arrangement!” she cried, throwing her hands up in exasperation. “But then we talked in this very room about things that mattered to us.
We held hands. We danced.
You kissed me like you were dying of thirst and I was water. You can hide behind your logic and your five-dollar words all you want, but you are drowning in feelings you’re too afraid to name.”
Her words hit their mark. He looked cornered, trapped between the towering shelves of facts and theories that had always been his sanctuary.
“You’re wrong,” he said, his voice barely a whisper.
“Am I?” she challenged, her eyes searching his, pleading with him to drop the act. “Prove it.
Look me in the eye and tell me you felt nothing. Tell me it was just a ‘symptom of prolonged proximity.’
Say it and I’ll walk away and play my part until we get the money.”
He opened his mouth, but no sound came out. His gaze darted away from hers, to the books, to the window, anywhere but at her face.
The silence was his confession.
And in that moment of victory, all of Chloe’s anger deflated, leaving behind a hollow, aching sadness. He was exactly what she’d said he was: a coward.
A brilliant, passionate, and fundamentally terrified man who would rather burn down something beautiful than risk getting burned himself.
“That’s what I thought,” she said softly, the fight draining out of her.
“You hide. You hide in here with your dead authors and your crumbling paper because it’s safe.
Nothing in here can hurt you. Nothing can challenge you or make you feel something unexpected.”
She backed away, creating a chasm between them that felt miles wide.
“You accused me of manufacturing feelings for a living,” she said, her voice trembling with the effort of holding back tears. “But you’re the one who’s truly fake, Alistair.
You’ve built this entire personality, this fortress of intellect, to keep from having to live a real life.”
He said nothing. He just stood there, looking utterly lost, a ghost in his own library.
The fight was over. There were no more words to say.
He had dissected their connection until it lay in pieces on the floor, and she had diagnosed his fear with surgical precision. They had both been right, and they had both been cruel.
Chloe turned and walked away, the sound of her footsteps echoing in the crushing silence. The contract was still in effect, but the partnership was shattered.
The show they had to put on tomorrow for Matilda and Caleb suddenly felt like an impossible, unbearable lie.
The only truth left between them was the raw, gaping wound of what they had just done.