MY FAKE BOYFRIEND CAN HEAR MY THOUGHTS
Chapter Ten: Signed in Truth (Our Contract Is Over. Or Is It?)
Thomas didn't say anything at all for one long, terrifying second after I took the microphone from his hand, and in that silence I became acutely, painfully aware of exactly how many phones were recording this moment for the rest of the internet to dissect forever.
This is it. There's no version of the next sixty seconds where I get to take this back.
"My name is Hazel Whitlock," I said, louder now, steadier than I felt. "Elowen is my twin sister. I've been standing in for her for the last month, because our families arranged a relationship neither of us actually chose, and because I love my sister enough to do something reckless when she asked me to."
That was the sentence that broke the room open. First, though, you should know what happened in the sixty seconds after I said it, because none of it went the way I'd braced for.
Elowen stepped up beside me before the murmuring crowd could fully process what I'd just said, taking the microphone gently from my shaking hand.
"Everything she's telling you is true," Elowen said, her voice carrying the same easy authority she'd used to win a hundred debate rounds. "I asked her to do this. I panicked about a relationship I never wanted, and instead of being honest about that, I ran, and left my sister to clean up a mess that was never hers to clean. If anyone in this room deserves criticism tonight, it's me, not her."
She's protecting me. In front of the entire board, in front of cameras, my perfect sister is finally choosing honesty over performance, and she's doing it loudly.
Thomas took the microphone next, and when he spoke, his voice had none of the careful, practiced calm I'd first met at that party a month ago.
"I knew," he said, simply, to the whole stunned room. "I've known since the night she signed the contract. I chose not to expose her, because by the time I understood what was happening, I already cared more about protecting Hazel than protecting my family's optics. If that's a reason to end this merger, I'll accept that consequence. But I won't pretend I regret it."
A ripple moved through the crowd at that, board members exchanging glances, my mother's hand pressed flat against her mouth, and it was Thomas's grandmother, finally, who rose from her seat near the front and crossed the room with unhurried, absolute authority.
"Enough," she said, and the whole ballroom went quiet the way it apparently always did whenever she decided it should. "I have heard enough tonight to last several lifetimes, most of it from my own grandson's cousin, who I understand orchestrated a great deal of this evening's drama in an attempt to prove a point about family favoritism."
Every eye in the room turned toward Julian, who had gone very pale near the back of the crowd.
"Julian's father," she continued, "has been quietly attempting to leverage this exact scandal to a rival firm for the last several days, hoping a public embarrassment would force my hand on the merger's leadership structure. I am, admittedly, disappointed that a member of this family let his own resentment be used as a tool for exactly that kind of manipulation." Her gaze softened, fractionally, when it landed on Julian. "Disappointed. Not without sympathy. We will discuss your father's conduct separately, and yours as well, but not tonight, and not in front of cameras."
Julian didn't fully understand he was being used either. That's almost sadder than anything else happening in this room right now.
Julian said nothing at first, jaw tight, and for the first time since I'd met him, he looked less like a boy scheming for advantage and more like one who'd just realized how small a pawn he'd actually been in someone else's larger game. When he finally spoke, it was quiet, aimed at Thomas rather than the room at large.
"I wanted you to lose something, just once," he said. "You've never had to. I thought if I could just make you feel what that was like, I'd finally matter as much as you do in this family."
"You already mattered," Thomas said, and something in his voice, tired and genuine at once, told me he meant it. "You just spent so long trying to prove it by tearing something down that you never noticed anyone was willing to say it plainly."
Julian didn't have an answer for that, and I found myself, unexpectedly, hoping that wherever the rest of his night went, it went somewhere gentler than the last month had been for any of us.
Thomas's grandmother turned back to the room at large, her voice carrying easily without any need for the microphone at all.
"As for the merger," she said, "it will proceed, on renegotiated terms, between adults, for adult reasons, which is precisely how it should have been structured from the beginning. There will be no more contracts written for children. Not in this family. Not after tonight."
She's ending it. The whole ridiculous, humiliating contract, gone, just like that.
"Elowen Whitlock," she continued, "if you're willing, I understand you have your own interests to discuss with this family regarding your future, separate from any romantic arrangement. My office, next week. Bring your cello, if the rumors I've heard tonight are accurate."
Elowen's mouth fell open slightly, glancing sideways at me in silent, startled question, and I only shrugged, because apparently honesty really was contagious once it started spreading through a room.
"And you," Thomas's grandmother said, finally turning to me, something almost gentle in her sharp, ancient eyes. "The pen has never once been wrong, in six generations. I find I have no complaints about the two of you, other than the manner in which I learned about it."
She left after that, sweeping out of the ballroom with the same unhurried authority she'd entered with, and the rest of the board followed close behind her, the scandal apparently resolved to whatever degree scandals involving cursed family pens could ever truly be resolved.
THOMAS
I felt it the second my grandmother finished speaking, a strange, quiet absence where a familiar hum of thought used to be.
I reached for Hazel's hand out of habit, the same instinct I'd had for a month now, bracing myself for the small, constant awareness of her feelings that had become as natural to me as breathing.
Nothing came.
Not silence, exactly. Just an ordinary, mortal kind of not knowing, the way every other person in that ballroom experienced each other, one closed door instead of an open one.
The contract's over, I realized, with something that felt like grief and relief tangled together so tightly I couldn't separate them. Whatever bound me to her thoughts, it ended the moment the terms did.
I looked at her, searching her face for some sign she understood what had just changed between us, and found her already watching me with the same startled realization.
HAZEL
"You can't hear me anymore," I said, quiet enough that only he could catch it over the noise of the dispersing crowd.
"No," Thomas said, something unsteady in his voice that had nothing to do with the board or the scandal or anything except the two of us. "I can't."
"How does that feel?"
He considered it for a long moment, his hand tightening around mine. "Terrifying," he admitted. "I got used to knowing things about you before you told me. Now I'm just going to have to ask, like everyone else does. Guess you'll have to tell me what you're thinking from now on."
I think I like that better anyway. I think I like it a lot better, actually.
I didn't tell him that thought out loud, not right away, savoring for one small, private moment the fact that it was mine now, entirely mine, to share only when I chose.
We didn't stay at the ballroom much longer after that. Elowen caught a ride with our mother, the two of them deep in a conversation I suspected had been sixteen years overdue, and Thomas drove me straight from the Gala to the Hartwell gallery, where the exhibition reception was still going, my portfolio still hanging on the walls under careful gallery lighting, my name printed neatly on a small placard beside it for the first time in my entire life.
Milo found us within minutes of walking in, already three cups of gallery lemonade deep, and greeted Thomas with the specific, thorough scrutiny of a best friend conducting a final round of questioning.
"So," Milo said. "Big dramatic gala confession. Very Kissing Booth of you two, not gonna lie."
"We try," Thomas said, deadpan, and Milo grinned like he'd finally, officially decided this whole complicated situation had his approval.
"For the record," Milo added, "I still think the questionnaire was a reasonable request. But I'll allow this."
We stood in front of my favorite piece together, the quick, loose study of light falling across empty easels I'd painted that first golden afternoon in his mother's studio, and Thomas was quiet for a long moment, studying it.
"I didn't know you kept that one," he said finally.
"It felt like the truest thing I painted all month," I said. "I wanted it hanging somewhere that mattered."
He reached into his jacket pocket then, and pulled out a folded cocktail napkin from the Gala, the kind of thing I would have thrown away without a second glance, except he'd clearly written something on it in the careful, deliberate handwriting I'd first mocked back in the library.
New contract, it read, in his own hand this time, no family lawyers involved. Terms: total honesty. No secrets, no mind reading required. Both parties agree to actually say things out loud from now on, however inconvenient that turns out to be.
Beneath it, he'd left a blank line, waiting.
"Sign it," he said, "if you want to."
I looked at him for a long moment, at the boy who'd started this whole mess by hearing a thought I never meant to let him hear, who had spent a month learning, slowly and imperfectly, exactly how to earn the right to hear the rest of them on purpose.
I signed my own name, my actual name, in my actual handwriting, no forgery required for the first time since this whole story started.
"Deal," I said.
He kissed me then, right there in front of my favorite painting, in front of Milo's delighted, muffled cheering and an entire gallery of strangers who had no idea what any of it meant, and it felt nothing at all like the desperate, stolen thing in the studio had felt. It felt like something we'd both actually chosen, in the open, with nobody's secrets left standing between us.
Somewhere back at Hale Tower, in a velvet lined case nobody had thought to check that night, the Silver Promise Pen sat perfectly still and silent, its centuries old work finally, quietly done.
And somewhere in Maine, in a kitchen three hundred miles from any of it, Elowen Whitlock picked up her phone to a single new text from a boy named Milo Marquez, who had gotten her number from Hazel an hour earlier "purely for logistics," and was now, apparently, asking if she played any instrument besides cello, because he had, and I quote, "a killer idea for a duet."
I found out about that text the next morning, from Elowen herself, who called me at eight a.m. sounding more flustered than I had ever once heard my perfectly composed sister sound in her entire life, demanding to know exactly how much I had told my best friend about her, and whether I thought a duet counted as a date.
I did not have a clean answer for her. I had, however, a whole gallery wall of paintings, a boy who no longer needed a cursed pen to know what I was feeling, and, for the first time since a sticky note ruined my entire month, a life that finally, entirely belonged to me.