Chapter 1
Evelyn's POV:
The chat window had been open for eleven minutes.
I sat at the back of my Media Theory lecture with my phone angled low beneath the desk, screen dimmed to almost nothing, composing a message I had already deleted three times. The slide on the projector said something about Baudrillard and simulacra. I was choosing not to think about how relevant that was.
okay so i've been thinking, I typed, and i feel like you're the only person in my life who isn't at least a little happy to hear from me.
I sent it before I could reconsider. The delivered receipt appeared. Then, after a pause I'd learned to interpret as him reading it twice before deciding whether to respond, the three dots appeared.
Good.
I exhaled through my nose. Good. One word, period included, which I had come to understand was actually a more engaged response than it looked. A month ago, he hadn't responded at all. I typed back immediately.
that's genuinely hurtful. everyone else lights up when i text them.
I'm not everyone else.
no you're really not, I sent, and I meant it more sincerely than he would ever know, though not in the way he might have assumed. which is exactly why i keep coming back. you're like a puzzle that's mean to me.
Then stop working on the puzzle.
i can't, i find you interesting. I paused, then added: also you respond faster than you want me to notice. i notice.
Thirty seconds of silence. Then: I was going to ignore that.
but you didn't :)
No response for two full minutes, which in Silas Ashford terms was the conversational equivalent of walking out of a room.
I checked the time — 2:14 p.m. in New York, which meant it was somewhere around 2 a.m. in Singapore — and made a note in the running document I kept on my laptop, nested three folders deep under a title that said "Project S." Week 4 update: still deflects warmth, still responds. Sarcasm frequency increasing. Good sign.
I closed the laptop and kept my phone in my hand for the rest of the lecture.
The thing about Silas Ashford was that he was not supposed to be interesting to me. He was supposed to be a task.
I understood this clearly. I had understood it from the moment I'd said yes to the whole arrangement, standing on a sidewalk on Bleecker Street at eleven-something at night with my work lanyard still around my neck and the flat, worn-out feeling that came from being twenty-one and broke in a way that sleep didn't fix.
I'd just wrapped up a four-hour gig helping a gin bar overhaul their social media presence — sixty-three dollars after the agency's cut — and I'd been running numbers in my head the way I always did on walks home. The math I'd memorized instead of song lyrics. The number that sat at the center of everything.
My parents had been scammed. That was the whole story, stripped to its plainest form. Someone they'd trusted had taken a significant amount of money through a scheme that looked legitimate long enough to matter, and by the time it unraveled, the damage was structural.
The debt that resulted wasn't the kind you paid off with a few tight months. It compounded. It had a second lien and a repayment schedule and a monthly amount I'd been supplementing since sophomore year — modeling when bookings came through, since I had the height for it, and media-adjacent gigs that put my MCC coursework to actual use.
None of it moved the number fast enough. All of it cost time I didn't have. The question I'd been turning over on that particular walk home was whether staying in school still made financial sense, or whether I should just leave and take something full-time before the interest ate any further into what my parents had left.
I was deep enough in that calculation that I almost didn't register the sound at first.
A bottle hit the pavement somewhere ahead of me — a clean, sharp crack that cut through the street noise — and I looked up. A woman was standing at the edge of the curb, not quite on the sidewalk and not quite in the street, listing slightly to the left in a way that had nothing to do with the uneven pavement.
She was trying to orient herself, keys already in hand, clearly meaning to cross to wherever she'd parked. That was exactly when I saw the cab — not slowing, not looking, accelerating through the yellow the way cabs do when they've already decided the light is theirs.
My arm went out before my brain finished the calculation. I grabbed her sleeve and pulled her back hard. The cab blew past close enough that the displaced air hit us both, and for a moment neither of us moved.
She steadied herself against my grip, then stood very still in the way people do when adrenaline hasn't caught up with the outcome yet. Up close, I could smell the wine on her — not overwhelming, but present, the kind of drinking that loosens your spatial awareness before it loosens anything else.
Her eyes, when she turned to look at me, were sharp despite everything. Tired and frustrated, the slightly glassy focus of someone who'd been sitting with something heavy before the alcohol made it heavier.
I knew who she was. You learned the names of certain people at NYU the way you learned campus landmarks — not because you'd sought out the information, but because it accumulated anyway. Camilla Sterling. Stern.
Sterling Retail. The window booth at the Kimmel Center café, always a laptop, always alone, always dressed like she was heading somewhere that required a firm handshake.
We had no real overlap. No shared classes, no mutual friends I was aware of. I was fairly certain she'd never registered my existence before this moment.
She looked at me. Something shifted in her expression — not gratitude, and not warmth, but the specific recalibration of a person who had just been reminded that strangers can still be useful, and was now reconsidering the one standing in front of her.
"Evelyn Callahan," she said. It wasn't a question.
