Chapter 445 | Lemon Cleaner and Strawberry Shampoo

Chapter 445: 445 | Lemon Cleaner and Strawberry Shampoo

Jordan pulled into the Cooper Garment Lofts parking structure at four-seventeen and killed the engine. The Civic ticked in the silence. Cassie’s twenty-dollar bill sat folded in his jacket pocket like a receipt for something he hadn’t purchased yet.

He sat there for a full minute, doing nothing, thinking about nothing, which was a lie because Jordan McKnight had not thought about nothing since January tenth.

Cassie knew the money didn’t add up. She’d traced the Delaware LLC. She’d found the deposits. She hadn’t found the source, but Cassie didn’t need a source to build a case. She just needed enough gaps to prove the story was wrong, and then she’d fill those gaps herself with whatever theory caused the most damage. That was how his sister operated. She didn’t solve puzzles. She broke them into smaller puzzles and solved those instead until the original picture stopped mattering.

Jordan grabbed his phone from the cupholder and checked the time. Four-eighteen. Lila’s tech check was at five. Kumiko’s overlay needed approval. Chloe needed her back rubbed. The quest ticker for StellarNote sat at forty-one hours and shrinking.

He should go upstairs.

Instead, he opened Alexis’s message from four-thirty that morning, the one he’d been ignoring for three days.

Alexis: Can we talk about something real? Not shopping. Not Harrison. Something real.

Jordan stared at the nine words. Then he closed the app, opened it again, and stared at them for another twelve seconds. The message had arrived at four-thirty in the morning, which meant Alexis Van Der Berg had been awake in her parents’ Newport estate, alone in her room with the trust fund and the arranged marriage and the henley she’d stolen from his laundry basket, and she had typed nine words to the boy she used to call a simp.

Four-thirty in the morning is not a time people send casual messages. Four-thirty is the hour when the person you’ve been pretending not to think about becomes the only person you can think about, and the phone in your hand becomes a loaded confession that you tell yourself you’ll delete in the morning but never do.

Jordan knew this because he’d spent most of November sending messages to Eliza at four-thirty in the morning. Messages she never answered. Messages that cost him sleep and dignity and eventually forty-five hundred dollars.

The difference was that Alexis hadn’t asked for money. Hadn’t asked for dinner. Hadn’t asked for anything except something real, and that single word sat heavier than every iced vanilla coffee Eliza had ever pretended to buy him.

He typed three words.

Jordan: Thursday. After class.

Then he locked the phone, shoved it in his pocket, and took the elevator to the fourth floor.

The hallway smelled like lemon cleaner and Kumiko’s strawberry shampoo, which had become the default scent of the entire building since she’d moved in and begun showering with the bathroom door open because, as she’d explained with zero self-awareness, the steam helped her think. Miss Valentine’s door was shut, but a plate of snickerdoodles sat on the hallway table outside her unit with a handwritten note that read FOR THE LOUD ONES with a smiley face. Jordan took two cookies and kept walking.

Unit 403’s door was cracked open. Music leaked through the gap. Not Kumiko’s usual J-pop but something ambient, electronic, the kind of soundtrack that played during final boss cutscenes in games Jordan used to play when his life consisted of League of Legends and regret.

He pushed the door open with his shoulder and walked into controlled chaos.

Kumiko sat cross-legged on the studio desk, her legs folded beneath her with the flexibility of someone who stretched daily and sewed in positions that would hospitalize a normal person. She wore a cropped lavender sweater that rode up past her navel when she leaned forward, exposing the soft curve of her stomach and the strawberry-print waistband of her underwear peeking above black leggings. Her twin tails were up, ribbons fresh, pink notebook open on her knee with seven Post-it notes fanning out from the spine like plumage. She was talking at a speed that suggested her brain had disconnected from her respiratory system approximately forty minutes ago and neither party had noticed.

"The overlay resolution needs to be sixteen by nine but Yuna rendered it at four by three which means the subscriber alerts clip behind the camera frame and the donation ticker overlaps the chat window by eleven pixels which I KNOW sounds small but eleven pixels is the difference between professional and trash and I refuse, I literally refuse to let Chloe-chan’s debut look like it was designed by someone who doesn’t understand aspect ratios, Jordan-kun, do you understand aspect ratios because I need you to say yes."

"Yes."

"You don’t know what an aspect ratio is."

"I know it’s sixteen by nine."

Kumiko pointed her pen at him. "That is the bare minimum of acceptable knowledge and I am choosing to accept it."

Chloe stood at the ring light, adjusting the angle with one hand while holding her phone in the other, comparing the camera preview to something on screen. She’d changed into a fitted black turtleneck and dark jeans, her blue streak pinned back with a single clip. The gold choker still covered the mark on her throat. Her feet were bare on the hardwood, and Jordan watched the way her weight shifted as she tilted the light another two degrees and then back, testing shadows on her own face with the focus of someone who had spent six months learning exactly how light could lie.

"You’re late," Chloe said without turning around.

"Cassie wanted to talk."

"I know. You texted me seventeen minutes ago. That means you sat in the car for fourteen minutes doing nothing productive."

"I was processing."

"You were spiraling."

"Processing and spiraling are the same thing when your sister has your credit statements."

Chloe finally turned. Her brown eyes found his, and she held the look for exactly the amount of time it took to communicate that she had already accounted for Cassie’s investigation, had already built contingencies for three possible outcomes, and had already decided that Jordan’s fourteen minutes of parking lot anxiety were both forgivable and slightly pathetic.

"Did she find anything new?"

"She found the Delaware LLC."

Something tightened behind Chloe’s expression. Not fear. Chloe didn’t do fear. She did risk assessment, and the Delaware LLC represented a thread that, if pulled, led to StellarNote, which led to Nova Network, which led to Brooke’s operating agreement, which led to revenue streams that an eighteen-year-old should not possess, which led to questions that Jordan could not answer without revealing a golden phone application that would make him sound clinically insane.

"Did she ask about the filing agent?"

"No. She asked about the three thousand dollar transfer on January tenth."

Chloe’s mouth flattened. "What did you tell her?"

"Startup capital."

"From where?"

"I didn’t specify."

"Good. Don’t." Chloe returned to the ring light and adjusted it another degree. "If she traces the LLC back to Brooke’s legal address, we have a problem. If she stops at the filing, we have time."

"How much time?"

"Enough."