Chapter 2
1115 Words
VIVIENNE'S POV
My hand tightened around the phone.
I had not expected this. Not today, not this early, not before I had done a single thing to set any of this in motion. I stood on the front path of the Ashworth house with the morning cold cutting through my coat and made myself breathe normally before I spoke.
"Mr. Steele," I said. "This is a surprise."
"I imagine it is." There was no warmth in his voice but there was no coldness either. Just precision. The voice of a man who chose every word on purpose. "I'd like to meet with you privately. Today if possible. I have something I'd like to discuss with you that I'd prefer not to go through with the family."
I thought very quickly. In my first life Roman and I had barely spoken. Two brief encounters at family events and then Margaret had dissolved the betrothal contract on my behalf and Roman had moved on to Clarissa without visible objection. I had told myself he hadn't cared either way. I had told myself the arrangement was purely business to him and I had been easily interchangeable.
But he was calling me. Before I had done anything. Before the filing, before Iris, before anyone outside this house knew I was moving. Which meant something had already reached him. Or he had already been looking.
"Today works," I said. "Where?"
He named a hotel in the business district. A private dining room. Noon. I wrote nothing down because I didn't need to. I told him I would be there and ended the call and stood on the path for a moment with the phone in my hand.
Then I kept walking toward Iris Lowe's office because Roman Steele could wait until noon and Iris could not.
Iris Lowe was exactly as I remembered her. Mid-forties, compact, precise. Her office was ordered in a way that suggested she did not tolerate inefficiency even from her own furniture. She shook my hand, gestured to the chair across from her desk, and waited.
I put the folded list on her desk and said nothing.
She opened it and read it. I watched her face. She was good, almost nothing moved, but there was a moment about halfway through where she went very still in a way that wasn't her baseline stillness. She finished reading, set the list down flat, and looked at me.
"How do you know all of this?"
"I did my research," I said.
She looked at me for a long moment. I could see her deciding whether to push. She decided not to. That was the thing about Iris, she was pragmatic above everything else. She had a list in front of her that told her exactly where to look and she was already thinking about what she would find when she got there.
"If even half of this is accurate," she said carefully, "the Ashworth estate records are going to need to be frozen immediately pending a full review."
"All of it is accurate," I said.
"The betrothal contract," she said. "The one naming you. Do you have a physical copy?"
"My grandmother had one. It will be in the reading room of the Ashworth house, inside a hollowed dictionary on the third shelf. You'll need to move before anyone thinks to clear that room."
Iris looked at me again with that same careful expression. I understood what she was thinking. Nobody researched it like this. Nobody walked in with this level of precision unless they had either been planning it for years or had a source inside the family. She was trying to work out which one I was.
"Miss Ashworth," she said finally, "I'm going to ask you one more time. Is there anything about how you came to have this information that I need to know before I file anything?"
"No," I said. "There's nothing that will affect the case."
She accepted that. She pulled the list toward her and reached for her notepad. "Then let's get to work."
I left her office an hour later with the filing already in motion and the estate records freeze request drafted and ready. Iris moved fast when she had something solid to work with, and I had given her something very solid. By tomorrow morning Margaret would receive a legal notice over breakfast and the ground would start shifting under everyone's feet.
I had two hours before I needed to be at the hotel.
I spent them walking. Not aimlessly — I was thinking, mapping out the next moves, calculating what Roman knew about the betrothal contract meant for the timeline. He had called me before the filing. That meant he had been looking at the original arrangement on his own, which meant something about it had already bothered him. I needed to know what he knew before I told him anything.
The hotel dining room was quiet when I arrived. Private, as promised. Roman was already there.
I had forgotten how he occupied a room. He was sitting at the table reading something on his phone and he looked up when I walked in and for a moment neither of us spoke. He was exactly as I remembered, dark, still, the kind of man who made you feel like every move you made was being catalogued. In my first life that quality had made me look away. This time I held his gaze and crossed the room and sat down across from him.
"Miss Ashworth," he said.
"Mr. Steele."
He set his phone down. "I'll get straight to the point. I've been reviewing the original betrothal agreement between our families. The one with your name on it." He paused. "I was told you withdrew voluntarily. I'd like to know if that's true."
I looked at him across the table and made a decision.
"No," I said. "It isn't."
Something shifted in his expression, not surprise exactly. More like confirmation of something he had already suspected. He leaned back slightly and studied me.
"Then I'd like to know," he said quietly, "exactly what happened."
I folded my hands on the table and looked at him steadily. "How much time do you have?"
He didn't smile. But something in his eyes changed. "As much as it takes."
I took a breath and opened my mouth to speak, and then my phone buzzed on the table between us. I glanced down at the screen.
A message from Clarissa.
"Iris Lowe just called the house asking for the reading room to be made available for document
retrieval. Would you like to tell me what you've done, or should I ask Mother?"
- Writer
