MY FAKE BOYFRIEND CAN HEAR MY THOUGHTS
Chapter Four: My Fake Boyfriend Knows My Secret
I spent the entire evening after the debate staring at my phone like it might explode, which, considering the last text Thomas had shown me came from a woman who owned a two hundred year old cursed fountain pen, did not feel like an unreasonable precaution.
We need to talk. Tonight.
Three words. No context. No emoji, obviously, because I could not picture Thomas Hale's grandmother ever using an emoji in her life, but also no clue whatsoever about whether "we" meant her and Thomas, or her and Thomas and, somehow, me.
He texted me at nine fifteen. Four words, which felt like a pattern developing in this family that I did not love.
It's fine. Explain tomorrow.
That is not reassuring. That is the opposite of reassuring. "It's fine, explain tomorrow" is what people say right before something is extremely not fine.
I didn't sleep well. I want to be very clear about that, because the next morning, when Thomas found me at my locker looking like I'd personally survived a small natural disaster, the first thing out of his mouth was, "You look like you didn't sleep."
"I had a very stressful text conversation with your family's pen legacy last night," I said. "What did she want?"
He leaned against the locker next to mine, arms crossed, and for a second something flickered across his face that looked almost like he was deciding how much of the truth to actually give me.
He's about to lie to me. Or edit something. I can tell.
"She wanted to move up the merger photo schedule," he said. "The board wants more public appearances before the quarter closes. That's it. That's the whole conversation."
"That's not the whole conversation," I said. "You paused before you said it."
Something in his expression shifted, a small, reluctant kind of respect crossing his features, like I'd caught him at something he hadn't expected me to catch. "Fine. She also asked me a question I didn't love answering."
"Which was?"
"Whether I'd noticed anything different about Elowen lately."
Oh no.
"What did you say?"
"I said people change over a summer," Thomas said, watching me carefully. "Which is true. Just not in the way she meant it."
THOMAS
Here is the part I didn't tell Hazel at her locker, mostly because I hadn't fully worked out yet what to do with it myself.
My grandmother had not asked me that question the way you ask a casual question. She'd asked it the way she asks everything, slow and deliberate, watching my face for the answer before I gave one, in the same private study where she'd handed Hazel that pen a week and a half ago.
"The Ledger's never been wrong about who signs it," she'd said, not looking up from the tea she was pouring, in that tone she uses that makes even small talk sound like testimony. "Not once in six generations. Which is why I find it curious that the girl who signed it doesn't move like the girl in every photograph I have of her before this contract."
She knows something is different. She doesn't know what yet. But she's watching, the same way Julian's been watching, except she has three hundred years more practice at it than he does.
"People change," I'd said, keeping my voice as even as I could manage.
"They do," my grandmother agreed, finally looking up, her eyes sharp in a way that made me feel, briefly, eleven years old again. "Tell me, Thomas. Has the pen given you any trouble since the signing?"
I hadn't answered that one directly. I'd told her the merger schedule needed adjusting, changed the subject as smoothly as I knew how, and left before she could ask a follow up question I genuinely did not have a safe answer for.
I did not know, walking home that night, whether she suspected the truth, or simply suspected that something about her family's oldest tradition had started behaving in a way she didn't fully understand. Either way, I understood one thing clearly enough. The clock on however much time Hazel had to be someone else was shorter than either of us had let ourselves believe.
HAZEL
"So she suspects something," I said, once Thomas had finished summarizing the parts he was willing to summarize.
"She suspects something," he agreed. "I don't think she knows what yet."
Great. Wonderful. Add a three hundred year old family matriarch to the list of people circling this secret, right behind Julian and whoever left that note in my locker.
"On a completely unrelated note," Thomas said, in the deliberately casual tone I was starting to recognize as his way of changing the subject before I spiraled any further, "how's the portfolio coming?"
It was not coming. It was, in fact, a disaster, and the reminder of it landed in my stomach like a stone.
"Nineteen pieces of my twelve are half finished and none of them are good enough," I said. "I haven't had studio time in a week and a half because I've been too busy learning how to be someone else."
"Come to my house tonight," Thomas said, and then, at whatever expression crossed my face, added quickly, "not like that. My mother had a studio built into the east wing before she died. Glass walls, good light, nobody's used it in years. It's just sitting there."
He's offering me his dead mother's art studio. That is either the sweetest thing anyone has ever offered me or an incredibly complicated emotional minefield, possibly both.
"Are you sure?" I asked, quieter now. "That seems like it means something. The studio, I mean."
Something in his expression went careful, the way it always did whenever we got close to the parts of him he didn't usually let people see. "It does mean something. Which is exactly why I'm offering it to you and not to anyone else who's ever asked to see it."
I didn't have a response for that one either, so I just said yes, and spent the rest of the school day distracted enough that Julian caught me staring at nothing during third period and asked, with entirely too much interest, what exactly I found so fascinating about a blank wall.
"Thinking about color theory," I said, which was not technically a lie, since I had, in fact, been thinking about color theory, just in the context of a room I wasn't supposed to know existed yet.
"Since when do you think about color theory," Julian said, tilting his head in that way he had, like he was recalibrating some private instrument every time I said something that didn't quite match the girl he thought he knew. "You've never once mentioned art in three years of me sitting across from you at lunch."
Careful. He's collecting these. Every small mismatch goes into a file somewhere in that head of his.
"People change over a summer," I said, echoing Thomas's own line back at him without entirely meaning to, and watched something unreadable pass over Julian's face before he shrugged and let it go, at least for now.
The studio, when I finally saw it that evening, was the single most beautiful room I had ever stood in. Glass walls facing west, catching the last hour of golden light exactly the way every painter I'd ever studied said you were supposed to want, easels still standing where they'd been left, canvases stacked against one wall under a thin layer of dust that nobody had disturbed in what looked like years.
"Nobody comes in here," Thomas said, watching me take it in from the doorway like he wasn't sure whether he was allowed to follow me inside his own house. "Not even the staff. I told them not to touch it after she died."
"How long ago?"
"Six years." He said it simply, the way he said most hard things, plain fact rather than performance. "I don't remember her painting technique specifically. I remember the light in here at this exact hour, and the smell of turpentine, and not much else. I was young."
He's letting me into the one room he's protected for six years. I don't think he does that lightly.
I set up in the corner nearest the best light and worked for two hours straight, the longest uninterrupted stretch of real focus I'd had since the sticky note first ruined my month, and Thomas sat quietly on an old paint stained stool across the room, scrolling through something on his phone, occasionally glancing up to watch me work with an expression I pretended very hard not to notice.
At some point I switched from the still life I'd been struggling with all week to something I hadn't planned at all, a quick, loose study of the way the light fell across the empty easels along the far wall, the dust motes catching gold in the last hour of sun, and when I finally looked up from it I found Thomas watching not the painting, but me, with an expression that made something warm and complicated settle low in my chest.
"What," I said, self conscious under it in a way I hadn't been all afternoon.
"Nothing." He looked back down at his phone a beat too quickly. "You just look like you belong in here. That's all."
He's not wrong. I don't think I've felt this much like myself in the last two weeks combined.
"You're staring," I said eventually, echoing his own line back at him from the library.
"I'm strategizing," he said, and I laughed, surprised again by how easily he could still do that, pull an actual laugh out of me on a day that had started with a cryptic text from his grandmother and a growing list of people who suspected I wasn't who I said I was.
We didn't talk about the note in my locker, or Julian's sharp attention, or the merger, or the pen, for two whole hours. It was, I would think later, the first stretch of time since the crossroads note appeared that I'd felt entirely like myself, in a room that wasn't asking me to be anyone else at all.
It didn't last.
My phone buzzed around eight, then buzzed again almost immediately, and when I finally checked it, my stomach dropped clean through the studio floor.
@LarkspurLowdown had posted again, a single photo of Thomas's car parked outside the east wing gates, timestamped less than an hour ago, captioned in bold, deliberate letters clearly built for maximum reach:
Which Larkspur It Couple isn't what they seem? Hint: one of them has a twin.
I stared at the caption until the letters stopped making sense as words, and looked up to find Thomas already reading it over my shoulder, his jaw tight, every trace of the easy afternoon gone from his face in an instant.
"Someone knows," I said, my voice barely above a whisper. "Someone actually knows, and they just told the entire school."
Thomas didn't answer right away. He was too busy staring at the post with an expression I hadn't seen on him before, not the careful composure he wore for cameras, not the quiet warmth he'd shown me in this room ten minutes ago, but something colder and more focused, the look of someone doing rapid, urgent math on exactly how much damage had just been done and how little time we had left to undo it.
"We need to figure out who runs that account," he said finally, already pulling up something on his own phone, thumb moving fast. "Tonight. Before this gets one more share than it already has."
"And if we can't?"
"Then we get ahead of it before my grandmother, or Julian, or your mother's biggest client finds a reason to ask the one question none of us can afford to answer honestly yet."
He said "yet." Like there's a version of this where we do answer it honestly. Like some part of him is already imagining a version of us that doesn't need a secret to survive.
I looked at the photo again, at the timestamp, at the deliberately vague wording built to spread exactly as fast as it had, and felt the last of the studio's warm, golden quiet drain out of the room entirely, replaced by the familiar, cold certainty that whoever was behind that account already knew more about my life than I'd told almost anyone in it.