Chapter 1
Vee stood at the arrivals gate, doing her best impression of a person who wasn’t spiraling. She glanced down at herself and felt, not for the first time, like a character from a different movie had wandered into the wrong set. Her outfit was a mess of eras—chains, rings on nearly every finger, a battered Bikini Kill tee, leather jacket stiff at the shoulders, combat boots scuffed. The Chanel box bag slung crosswise at her hip wasn’t even hers—her best friend Morgan had shoved it at her months ago, with that executive casualness that made it impossible to say no.
Morgan was the nerve center of their messy little triangle. Vee’s best friend since high school. Sloane’s since Penn. Former Heritage fleet director, current consultant. She was the kind of busy that still made time for group chats and crisis calls. Vee loved her. Sometimes wanted to strangle her. Always listened to her.
The flowers were from the corner market, a fistful of ranunculus and something vaguely green she hadn’t identified. She’d kept the receipt. God forbid she lose the tax write-off on her own humiliation.
Her nails glittered faintly—subtle, tasteful, like she wasn’t trying too hard. Like she hadn’t spent over a year in this maddening cycle of hot-cold-pull-push with Sloane.
She shifted her weight, boots creaking, and let herself spiral a little, because what the hell else was she going to do? She replayed the texts in her head.
Two months. Two whole months since they’d last seen each other at Morgan’s wedding, though they’d been texting the whole time—sporadically, but with that bite. Late-night dirty jokes. Flirty memes that hit just wrong enough to keep Vee up at night. Sloane texting her:
Hey, I’ll be in Chicago next week. We should grab a drink. Let’s talk.
Let’s talk.
Vee had spent the last six days doing mental gymnastics over that. Did it mean what she thought it meant? Were they finally going to have the conversation? The capital-T Talk? The I like you, you like me, maybe we should stop pretending we’re just occasional bodies Talk?
Because they had been occasional bodies. It started through that whole fucked-up whistleblower scandal that had nearly tanked the airline—Sloane was one of Morgan’s people, flown in like a precision missile, all ice and Yale Law pedigree and legal authority. And there was Vee, elbow-deep in a stripped-down engine at midnight, grease-streaked and bone-tired, when Sloane—Sloane in heels, in a perfect black pencil dress—walked onto the floor, demanding files nobody else could find.
Later that night, whiskey on Vee’s breath, Sloane’s tongue in her mouth, hands everywhere, Sloane’s body pressed flush to hers in a too-small bathroom stall. That stupid, hot, reckless night had spiraled into a pattern—months of texting, of sneaking off together, of Sloane’s hand fisted in Vee’s hair, of Sloane’s voice gone low and soft, saying, fuck, don’t stop, before disappearing again for months.
And now, here she was.
Morgan had texted last night:
Emergency came up. Kieran’s stuck at Ren’s moot court thing. Can you pick Sloane up at the airport?
Sure. Sure, she could pick Sloane up. It wasn’t like she had anything better to do. It wasn’t like she’d planned her whole outfit with I’m about to confess my feelings at the airport energy, wasn’t like she’d debated if a bouquet was too much before telling herself to get over it and just buy the fucking flowers.
And then—
Sloane appeared.
Tall, radiant, impossible.
Deep brown skin that seemed to catch and hold the sunlight, hair pulled up into a high, lush bun, curls soft and neat like they’d been styled by a professional two hours ago. Her mouth—Oh, her mouth. Lips painted in some warm, glossy shade that made Vee’s brain short-circuit. She was wearing a soft cream sweater, light slacks, flats, of all things, that still left her towering—five-ten barefoot, probably. She looked exactly the same and completely untouchable.
Vee’s heart did a pathetic, ugly little lurch.
“Hey,” she said, and it came out too quiet, too tentative. She tried again, stronger this time. “Morgan got called into an emergency thing last minute, and Kieran’s in Indiana—some law school thing for his kid, I don’t know. So I’m here.” She held out the flowers. “Welcome back to Chicago.”
Sloane’s eyes dropped to the flowers. Then back up to Vee’s face. There was a flicker—sharp, unreadable, like a pane of glass catching the sun.
“You shouldn’t have,” she said, voice low. Cool.
A pause. Just a beat too tight.
“I actually just started seeing someone. It’s…new. But serious. I don’t want to blindside you.”
Vee’s brain went sideways. Her ears rang. Not in a poetic, heart-fluttering way, but in the way you get when you stand too close to an air compressor. The words hit, all right. Square in the chest. Except no—this wasn’t a hit. This was a goddamn ambush. A low, quiet fuck you wrapped in a bow.
“Oh,” she heard herself say, like she was in a sitcom where the laugh track had been yanked out at the last second. Her voice sounded small, half-cooked. There was a nod—small, polite, fucking stupid—because what else was she supposed to do? Her throat went dry, and she felt the blood leave her face in one slow, public exhale.
Of course. Of course. Because why wouldn’t Sloane—this woman with her perfect skin, her flawless teeth, her neatly packed lawyer energy—have someone else? Some finance guy named Chris, probably. Or better yet, a wellness influencer named Dahlia who did hot yoga and posted cryptic thirst traps with the caption “soft where it counts, unbothered everywhere else.”
Vee could feel it happening in real time—the humiliation crystallizing inside her chest.
“I just thought,” she tried, her voice catching on the gravel in her chest, “you texted me to talk.”
Sloane’s mouth—those lips, shiny and perfect, the kind of mouth that had once been wrapped around Vee’s fingers—pressed into a line.
“Forget I said that.”
Forget.
Oh. Okay. Sure. Let’s all just forget.
Vee nodded again, because she was on autopilot now, running on some humiliating emergency generator that powered through sheer force of stubbornness. Her chest felt tight, and she was suddenly, vividly aware of how even at five-seven, and being the tallest girl in her family, she still had to tip her chin up just to meet Sloane’s eyes.
“Right,” she muttered.
She turned and pressed the flowers—those stupid, too-bright ranunculus, now burning a hole in her hand—into the hands of some guy standing nearby, a random suit who looked vaguely startled, like he hadn’t expected to get swept into the drama of the arrivals gate.
“Here,” Vee said, voice flat and sharp as a boxcutter. “You look like you could use these.”
She didn’t look back. She refused to look back. Lot’s wife had turned to salt for less, and Vee wasn’t about to risk getting calcified in the middle of O’Hare. Because it was always like this. This was the cost of wanting women like this. The waiting rooms, the admissions paperwork, the soft voices of intake nurses asking, “Do you feel like hurting yourself?”—and you’re sitting there trying to explain that, no, it wasn’t some external threat, it was just her. It wasn’t a sharp object, it wasn’t a high ledge, it wasn’t a bottle of pills. It was the way she said your name. It was the text that never came. It was the “I’m seeing someone.”
This wasn’t heartbreak. This was infrastructure failure.
Vee knew the drill. She’d seen friends check in, check out, stabilize, destabilize, patch themselves up, then do it again. Oh, so you just had a break-up? Okay, now you’re locked in the back room with a cold blanket and a plastic cup of water, whispering your own shame to a stranger who’s never been wrecked by a single fucking text.
And yet, if Sloane had turned around—right there at the gate, hair catching the light, mouth soft and perfect, looking at Vee like she meant it—and said, “Let’s go somewhere quiet,” she’d have followed. No hesitation.
* * *
They walked in silence to the parking garage.
Vee’s hands were tight on the wheel as she drove, the sky outside going that deep, endless blue of an early Chicago evening. Sloane sat in the passenger seat, a vision of casual disinterest, scrolling through her phone. Like Vee hadn’t just publicly offered her heart in the form of a supermarket bouquet and been slapped across the face with it.
They didn’t speak the whole drive to Morgan’s place, that old Victorian perched like some gothic cathedral on the West Side, looking down on the skyline like it knew all the secrets and was too tired to give a shit. Vee parked, put the truck in neutral, and sat for a second too long.
Sloane unbuckled her seatbelt.
“Thanks for the ride,” she said, not looking at her.
Vee just nodded. Once. Twice. A sharp, automatic tic. She watched Sloane disappear up the steps, her long, impossible legs eating up the distance, her high bun catching the light.
Vee exhaled slow, chest tight, and whispered, to no one in particular, “Motherfucker.”
* * *
She didn’t drive straight home.
Took a few wrong turns on purpose, let the city fall away behind her. Past Pulaski. Past the last gas station with lights still on. Out to Woytek’s lot—half-lit, half-forgotten, always open just enough if you knew which gate to push.
She parked the truck, climbed out, and crossed the yard without a word. The side door stuck like it always did. She shouldered it open. Lights off inside—just the security strip near the back, humming low and blue.
She keyed open her bay.
There it was. Low, quiet, parked where she left it. The other car.
Not pretty. Not flashy. But built mean.
She opened the driver’s side door. Slid in.
It smelled like rubber and cold vinyl and the kind of adrenaline she never talked about in therapy. She didn’t start it yet. Just sat. Hands on the wheel like they still knew what to do.
Her phone buzzed once.
Signal.
A message with nothing but a time and a cross street.
She didn’t react. Just turned the key.
The engine purred, low and clean. She eased out of the garage. No music. Didn’t head toward the meet. Not yet.
But the car was awake now.
And so was she.