Chapter 2
The specific unease of being correctly named by someone who should have had no reason to know it. "Eve, usually," I said. "You okay?"
"Just finished a shift?" she asked instead of answering, and somehow that told me more than any answer would have.
I nodded slowly. "Yeah."
What happened next was the most precise social pivot I had ever witnessed from someone who had just nearly been hit by a cab. Camilla's entire posture reconfigured — the residual tension smoothed out, replaced by something deliberate and calibrated.
One hand found my forearm; the other settled across my shoulders in an embrace that was warm the way a five-star hotel lobby is warm. Technically accurate. Professionally executed.
"I have a commission for you," she said, as though we were continuing a conversation rather than starting one. "Are you interested?"
The word commission rather than job told me immediately what register this was operating in. The honest answer was that I was financially interested in any sentence that started with I have a commission. But I didn't say yes right away. I asked what it was first.
What she described made me want to say no.
There was a man. Silas Ashford. He was at INSEAD in Singapore for his MBA, and he had a private Facebook account that Camilla had obtained through a connection she described only as the right people knowing the right people.
She'd spent two weeks messaging him herself. He'd seen every single one. He just hadn't responded — because he'd recognized her name and her angle immediately, and had decided accordingly.
So what she needed was someone to pick up where she'd left off. Log into her profile, use her photos and her details and her name, and keep going. Keep him talking. Keep him engaged. Build something, slowly, until he got comfortable enough to say yes to what she actually wanted.
Which was not love. Not a real relationship. Just the words — you're my girlfriend — attached to her name, in a context that could be documented.
The reason involved her father and a half-sibling who had recently surfaced with a legal challenge to her position at Sterling Retail. Details she offered briskly, without elaboration, in the tone of someone explaining the least interesting part of a problem they'd already solved in their head.
As for why me — Camilla was efficient about that part too.
Academic record. The kind of work I'd taken on. What people said about me afterward. She had concluded I was good at making people feel worth talking to, and that I needed money badly enough to follow through. She said both things without apology, and I respected that more than I would have respected a softer version of the same assessment.
I still didn't want to do it. Sliding into someone else's identity, sustaining a lie across weeks of conversation with a real person — it wasn't something I was comfortable with, and I told her that.
She listened. Then she told me the terms.
Ten thousand dollars a month. And if Silas confirmed the relationship within three months, a lump-sum bonus of two hundred and fifty thousand dollars.
She also reminded me — precisely, without sentiment — that she wasn't asking me to make him fall in love with anyone. She just needed him to say one thing. A title. A head-nod in the right direction. That was the entire job.
I stood there with the October air on my face and thought about the repayment calculator I'd had open on my phone three hours earlier.
I said I'd try. I said I couldn't guarantee results. Camilla said that was fine, handed me a card with a Gmail address on it, and walked herself into a car that appeared at the curb with impeccable timing, as though it had been waiting for exactly this moment to arrive.
That had been a month ago.
Now I was still at the back of the lecture hall, the class around me packing up and filing out. I unlocked my phone and opened the chat window.
I typed: okay but what if i asked really nicely.
He was still awake. The reply came back faster than it had any right to, given that it was past 2 a.m. on his end.
No.
I typed: you didn't even let me finish asking.
I don't need to.
that's so rude, I sent, and then immediately after: i'm charming. people enjoy being asked things by me. you're statistically unusual.
I'm aware.
I stared at that for a moment. I'm aware. There was something in the phrasing I'd noticed before — the way he occasionally said something that acknowledged me without conceding anything, that confirmed he was paying attention without admitting that attention meant anything. I saved the exchange in my notes and sat with it for a second.
Then I typed: okay. hypothetically. if i said please and also promised to be very low-maintenance. like, barely even there.
The answer is still no.
what if it was just a few days? a trial run?
No.
you're so mean to me, I typed, and I was aware, sending it, that I wasn't entirely performing.
There was a pause. Longer than usual. Long enough that I thought he might actually be done for the night. Then the reply came through.
I know.
