Chapter 409 | Cassie’s Autopsy

Chapter 409: 409 | Cassie’s Autopsy

Chloe gave him exactly four seconds to sit with the text before she started talking.

"Saturday. Your parents want dinner Saturday. Cassie’s driving down from San Francisco, which means she’s taking Friday off work, which means this is planned and not casual." She ticked the points off on her fingers, two fingers, because Chloe operated in pairs and fours. "Your mother has been texting you for three weeks and you’ve been answering in single sentences. Your father called once and you let it ring. Cassie sent four messages before this one and you responded to zero." She paused long enough to pick up the Brita pitcher and pour herself water she did not drink. "They think you’re either dead, on drugs, or in a cult. Cassie’s coming to perform an autopsy."

"That’s not what an autopsy means."

"I know what an autopsy means. I’m saying she’s going to open you up and look at your organs either way."

Jordan picked up his phone and read the text again. The words arranged themselves into Cassie’s voice without effort, the specific cadence of a woman who ran a trading desk and treated family gatherings with the same precision she applied to quarterly reports.

Cassie did not ask questions she did not already know the answers to. She collected facts and assembled them into structures that supported interrogations, and the phrase whole different person sat in the message like evidence waiting for cross-examination.

Cassie had seen Jordan on FaceTime the night Chloe answered his phone in a towel and wet hair. That image had gone into a file somewhere, categorized and indexed, waiting for the moment it became relevant to a larger investigation.

"I can’t sit across from Cassie at Giuliano’s and pretend nothing’s different." He said this to the eggs rather than to Chloe, because the eggs would not argue and they would not fix him with the look that said I know you’re catastrophizing but you’re also not wrong.

"She reads people for a living. She manages portfolios worth more than my entire apartment building. She analyzes risk curves and structural vulnerabilities and she does it in rooms full of men who want her to fail, so sitting across from her little brother who used to weigh 195 and now weighs 178 with visible collarbones and jaw definition is going to trigger about forty different alerts in her head."

He set the phone face-down on the counter, which solved nothing.

"Great. Helpful. Thanks."

Chloe set the water glass on the counter with a sound like a period at the end of a sentence. "Here’s what’s going to happen. You’re going to text Cassie back in the next ninety seconds and tell her Saturday works. You’re going to tell your mother you’re bringing your girlfriend and that you have news. You are not going to specify what the news is because your mother will assume proposal and that buys us emotional runway."

"She’s going to assume I proposed to my girlfriend of six weeks."

"Your mother has been assuming you would die alone since Christmas. Proposal is an upgrade." Chloe crossed the kitchen and stood close enough that he could feel the heat from the stove on her hip through his shirt. "You text Cassie. I text your mother. We show up Saturday looking like two people who have their lives together, which we do, and we tell them about the baby over dessert when your father has wine in his system and your mother has had time to decide she likes me."

"You’re going to text my mother."

"Susan loves me. She told me at Giuliano’s that I remind her of herself at twenty-three, which is the highest compliment a Korean-adjacent mother-in-law figure can deliver." Chloe took his phone from the counter and held it out to him screen-first, Cassie’s message still glowing. "Ninety seconds. Clock’s running."

Jordan looked at the phone. The kitchen smelled like food Chloe had made for him while he ate pancakes with his friends, and the harbor light was doing the thing it did in the late morning where it turned everything amber and soft, and somewhere through the wall Kumiko was probably documenting this moment in her notebook through sheer intuition.

He typed the response to Cassie in eleven seconds. saturday works. bringing chloe. tell mom we have news and she should make the reservation for five, not four.

The five was optimistic. It assumed Cassie would not bring a plus-one, which Cassie never did because Cassie viewed romantic partners as liabilities with limited upside. But Jordan wanted the number five because it was bigger than four and smaller than six and it gave him exactly one empty chair to put between himself and his sister at the table.

Cassie responded in under a minute, her typing speed a direct inheritance from their grandmother who had typed eighty words per minute on an IBM Selectric until the arthritis took her knuckles at sixty-eight.

five works. who’s the fifth.

you’re the fifth.

cute. see you saturday. wear something that doesn’t make you look like you sleep in a parking lot.

Jordan locked the phone and set it face down on the counter with the specific care of a man placing a live explosive on a shelf. Chloe had already retreated to the couch with her laptop, the transition from crisis manager to content strategist happening in the space between the kitchen island and the grey sectional cushion. She typed with the focused intensity of someone composing a message that would determine the emotional trajectory of an entire family dinner.

"What are you writing to my mother."

"I’m telling Susan that Jordan has been working very hard this semester, that he’s been eating well and exercising, and that he has something important to share with the family on Saturday." Chloe’s fingers paused on the keys. "I’m also telling her that Cassie should please not interrogate him in the first fifteen minutes because he responds better to warmth than to pressure, which Susan already knows but Cassie deliberately ignores."