The sweet scent of freshly cut grass and triumph clung to Alistair as they walked back toward the sprawling manor. Laughter, genuine and surprisingly easy, still echoed in his ears—his own included.
He felt a peculiar lightness in his chest, a buoyant feeling entirely at odds with the dense, academic texts that usually occupied his thoughts. Beside him, Chloe’s smile was a radiant thing, catching the afternoon sun and scattering it.
They had done it. They had faced down Caleb’s passive-aggressive croquet challenge and emerged not just unscathed, but victorious.
More than victorious, they had been charming. She had been charming, spinning his utter lack of coordination into a endearing narrative of professorial distraction.
He’d seen the shift in his family’s eyes—the grudging respect, the amusement, the acceptance. It was all her doing.
“I have to admit,” Alistair said, the words feeling novel on his tongue, “that was remarkably well-played. Strategically, I mean.”
Chloe bumped his shoulder with her own, a playful gesture that sent a jolt of warmth through his tweed jacket.
“Oh, please. You were the star of the show.
Your ‘mallet-to-ball spatial reasoning deficiency,’ as you called it, was a hit. My personal favorite was when you sent Caleb’s ball into the rhododendrons.”
“A purely accidental vector,” he insisted, though a pleased smile tugged at his lips. For the first time all weekend, he didn’t feel like an imposter.
He felt like half of a team. A very effective, if unconventional, team.
The contract, the library, the inheritance—it all felt distant, like the plot of a book he’d once read. The only thing that felt real was the sun on his face and the easy presence of the woman beside him.
He was beginning to understand that the space she occupied was not just physical; it was emotional, a vibrant area of warmth and wit that he was increasingly reluctant to leave.
As they neared the stone terrace where his grandmother was holding court with a few other family members, Chloe’s handbag buzzed with a low, insistent vibration. She ignored it, her attention still on him.
“I think Matilda is actually smiling. A legitimate, corner-of-the-mouth-upturned smile.
We may have just earned a Finch point.”
The phone buzzed again, more urgently this time. Chloe’s own smile faltered for a fraction of a second.
She fished the phone from her bag, her brow furrowing at the screen.
“Is everything alright?” Alistair asked.
“It’s Sarah. My business partner,” she said, her voice a little tight.
She thumbed the ignore button. “It can wait.”
But it couldn’t. The phone immediately began to buzz again, a frantic, desperate pulse against her palm.
With a sigh that seemed to carry the weight of a world far from the manicured lawns of Finchland, she gave Alistair an apologetic look.
“I’m so sorry, Alistair. I have to take this. I’ll be right back.”
She turned and walked a dozen paces away, finding a semblance of privacy near a weathered stone urn overflowing with ivy.
The shift in her posture was immediate and jarring. The relaxed, confident fiancée of Dr. Alistair Finch vanished.
In her place stood a different woman—tense, shoulders squared for a fight, her back a rigid line of defense. The “Finchland” fantasy, as she’d once jokingly called it, dissolved like mist.
Alistair remained on the edge of the terrace, caught in a strange no-man’s-land. He felt a proprietary urge to follow her, to fix whatever was wrong, but he was rooted to the spot by the stark reminder that her problems were not his.
Their connection was a fabrication, their intimacy a performance. He was merely her client.
He couldn’t hear Sarah’s side of the conversation, but Chloe’s words, hushed but sharp-edged, carried on the breeze.
“What do you mean you confirmed it?… Sarah, we talked about this. Explicitly.”
A pause. Chloe’s free hand went to her temple, massaging it as if warding off a migraine.
“A stripper? Are you insane?
For the Atherton wedding? Her father is a state senator!”
Alistair felt his blood run cold. A stripper?
The word was so jarringly out of place in the genteel atmosphere of the Finch estate, it felt like a gunshot. It belonged to another world—a world of bachelorette parties and tawdry entertainment, the very world Chloe had told him she was trying to escape.
Chloe started to pace, her elegant heels sinking slightly into the soft turf. “I don’t care if the maid of honor requested it!
Our brand is about elegance, discretion… This is a PR nightmare! Think of the legal liability…
No, I can’t deal with this right now.”
She listened for a long moment, her face a mask of escalating frustration. She looked over her shoulder, her eyes flicking toward Alistair and the family on the terrace.
He quickly looked away, pretending to study the intricate carving on the stone balustrade, but he felt her gaze like a physical touch.
He felt like a voyeur.
Then came the final, fatal phrase, the words that landed in Alistair’s gut like a punch.
“Just… stall them,” Chloe hissed into the phone, her voice dropping to a desperate whisper. “Do whatever you have to do.
I’ll fix it when I get back. I have to.
I need the money, Sarah. You know I do.”
I need the money.
The three words dismantled the afternoon’s pleasant illusion with surgical precision. They sliced through the warmth, the shared laughter, the feeling of teamwork.
They were a stark, cold reminder of the document sitting in his briefcase, the one that quantified their relationship in dollars and clauses.
He had known, of course. On an intellectual level, he understood this was a transaction.
But in the quiet of the library when she’d spoken of her dream, and in the bright sun of the croquet lawn when she’d made him feel capable and seen, he had allowed himself to forget. He had allowed the beautifully crafted performance to feel real.
He had allowed himself to believe that the warmth in her eyes when she looked at him was something other than professional expertise.
How foolish. He was an academic, a man who dealt in facts and primary sources.
And the primary source here was the contract. Her smiles, her witty retorts, her comforting presence—they were all deliverables.
Products rendered for a fee. The ease he felt wasn’t a genuine connection; it was expert client management.
Chloe ended the call, her thumb jabbing the screen with unnecessary force. She stood for a moment with her back to him, taking a deep, shuddering breath.
When she turned around, she was trying to reassemble the mask of serene composure, but the pieces no longer fit. Her smile was brittle, her eyes shadowed with a frantic, real-world anxiety that had nothing to do with him or his family.
She walked back toward him, forcing a lightness into her voice that sounded painfully false.
“Sorry about that. A little fire at the office. All handled.”
“A problem with your… professional commitments?” Alistair asked.
The words came out cooler than he intended, tinged with an academic sterility he hadn’t used with her since their first meeting in that sterile coffee shop.
Chloe’s eyes narrowed slightly, catching his tone. “You could say that.
My partner is in the process of driving our business straight off a cliff.” Her frustration was palpable, leaking from every pore.
She wasn’t performing now; she was real, and the reality was messy and stressful.
“The business that requires this particular engagement?” he pressed, unable to stop himself. He needed to re-establish the logical framework of their arrangement, if only to protect himself from the sting of his own gullibility.
Her head snapped up. The last of her feigned calm evaporated, replaced by a defensive spark.
“Yes, Alistair. The business.
The entire reason I am standing on this ridiculously perfect lawn, pretending to know what a mallet is for. Remember?”
Her sharpness stung, but it was the truth. It was the transactional core of their relationship, and he had been a fool to imagine it was anything more.
“Oh, I find it’s becoming increasingly difficult to forget,” he said, his voice quiet and level. “You’re incredibly convincing.”
It was meant as an accusation, a barb wrapped in the guise of a compliment. He wanted to see if it would land, if she would even register the hurt behind it.
She did. Her expression shifted from frustration to confusion, then to a guarded hurt of her own.
“That’s the job, isn’t it? To be convincing?”
“Indeed,” he replied, the single word creating a chasm between them. “A job for which you are being well compensated.
I’m glad to see my investment is yielding such a high-quality performance.”
Chloe stared at him, her mouth slightly agape. He could see the emotional calculation in her eyes as she processed his words.
He was no longer the clumsy, endearing academic she had coached through croquet. He was the man who had written the contract, the client questioning the authenticity of the service.
“Is that what you think this is?” she asked, her voice barely a whisper. “Just a performance you’ve paid for?”
He wanted to say no. He wanted to tell her about the flicker of something real he’d felt in the library, the genuine gratitude he’d felt on the lawn.
But the analytical, self-protective part of his brain—the part that had kept him safe in his world of books and solitude for so long—had taken command. Emotions were unreliable data points. Money, contracts, transactions—those were solid. Tangible.
“What else would it be?” he asked, the question hanging in the air between them, cold and heavy.
The hurt in her eyes solidified into a cool, professional resolve. She pulled the fractured pieces of her composure back into place, but this time it was a different mask—one of polite, impenetrable distance.
She was no longer Chloe, his charming fake fiancée. She was Ms. Jones, the service provider.
“Of course,” she said, her voice clipped and devoid of all its earlier warmth. “You’re right.
My apologies if my personal business intruded on my professional duties. It won’t happen again.”
Without another word, she turned and walked toward the house, her spine ramrod straight. Alistair stood alone by the ivy-covered urn, the scent of triumph replaced by the acrid smell of doubt.
The sun felt less warm now, the sprawling estate less like a temporary home and more like a gilded cage. He had wanted clarity, a return to the logical certainty of their contract.
He had it now. And he had never felt more alone.