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The mirror in the master bedroom of the mansion held a reflection that felt increasingly borrowed.
Cassie stared at the glass, the silk of her robe pooling around her like a shroud. She saw the ghost of Nate Jacobs—the meticulous, sharp-edged desperation she’d studied, the way Nate folded herself into the shadows of her own life until there was nothing left but the silhouette of someone else’s desire. It was a terrifying parallel to her own reflection.
Downstairs, the house was a cavern of mahogany and cold, calculated power. It was Nate’s house, but it was Maddy’s domain. And in the strange, suffocating hierarchy they had carved out—a triad built on the wreckage of high school betrayals—Cassie was the one who managed the ledger. She was the one who ensured the business moved forward while the foundation cracked beneath them.
The phone rang. It was always the same.
“Yeah, I’m at the bar on 4th. She’s... she’s not good, Maddy.”
The drive to pick up Cassie was a ritual of shame. When Maddy walked into the dim, neon-soaked dive, she found Cassie slumped over a booth, the remnants of a night of drinking leaving her glassy-eyed and unraveling. Cassie didn’t look at her with the fire of their youth; she looked at her with a hollow, frantic hunger.
Maddy hoisted her up, her grip firm, dragging the weight of Cassie’s fragility into the backseat of the car. Cassie leaned her head against the cool window, the city lights smearing into streaks of color.
“You’re pathetic,” Maddy murmured, though her hand hovered near the small of Cassie’s back, a phantom touch of tenderness that neither of them dared acknowledge in the daylight.
“I just...” Cassie’s voice was a jagged whisper. “I needed to stop seeing it. The way the walls close in.”
Back at the mansion, the air was thick with the scent of expensive candles and suppressed history. Later that night, the bedroom door clicked shut. The interaction was inevitable—a collision of two planets that had been orbiting each other in high-velocity conflict for years.
It was breathless, desperate, and devoid of the performative joy they used to chase.
Afterward, the silence was heavy, filled with the hum of the air conditioning and the rhythmic ticking of a clock that seemed to be counting down their shared undoing. Cassie lay back, her hair a tangled halo against the silk pillow, staring at the ceiling. Her eyes were vacant, the emptiness of a thousand failed performances flashing behind her eyelids.
“You know,” Cassie said, her voice sounding unnervingly thin. “It didn’t actually mean anything.”
Maddy propped herself up on one elbow, her dark eyes sharp and searching. “What? Our time in school? The way we were?”
Cassie turned her head. There was no tears, only a profound, crystalline exhaustion. “No. I mean all those... past trysts. The boys. The people I let touch me just to see if I was real.” A flicker of memory crossed her face—falling off the ice skating rink, the hollowed-out feeling of being an object, a prop in someone else’s narrative, the way life had been a series of closed doors. “They never meant anything to me. I was just... checking to see if I could feel something that belonged to me.”
She looked at Maddy then, a desperate, silent plea for verification.
Maddy didn't pull away. She reached out, her fingers tracing the line of Cassie’s jaw, mapping the terrain of a girl who had lost herself in the pursuit of being someone else’s tragic ending. “I know,” Maddy whispered, and for once, the bitterness in her voice was replaced by a dark, jagged pity. “You were never really there, were you?”
Cassie closed her eyes, the mansion around them feeling less like a home and more like an exhibit. She was the business partner, the caretaker, the ghost. And as she drifted into a fitful sleep, she realized that even in this house, even with Maddy, she was still just trying to find the version of herself that didn't shatter when the lights went out.