Chapter 494 | A Text Message From the Final Boss

Chapter 494: 494 | A Text Message From the Final Boss

Alexis looked at the eggs, then at Chloe, then at the eggs. Her hand drifted toward her neck before she caught it.

"I don’t usually eat breakfast."

"I don’t care what you usually do. Here we eat breakfast." Chloe pushed her glasses up. "Rule six. Meals are mandatory. You can negotiate portions later. Presence is non-negotiable."

"There are six rules?"

"There are nineteen. Kumiko has a summary on page three of her notebook. I have the full legal document with footnotes and an appendix about emoji usage."

Jordan pulled up a stool with his plate. Kumiko was already shoveling eggs and flipping pages. Chloe stood at the island with her coffee, watching Alexis the way she watched her subscriber count after a post went live.

Alexis picked up her chopsticks with a grip someone had drilled into her at age five, lifted a small portion, and chewed slowly.

"This is good."

"It’s eggs," Chloe said. "It’s not supposed to be good. It’s supposed to be fuel."

"Then your fuel is good."

Something moved in Chloe’s face, there and gone. She drank her coffee and said nothing.

"Chloe-chan puts milk in her eggs," Kumiko said. "That’s the secret. Most people use water but milk makes them fluffy, and fluffy eggs are happy eggs, and happy eggs make happy people."

"That’s not how any of that works."

"It’s how it works in my notebook, and my notebook is law in this jurisdiction." She tapped the page with her pen. "Alexis-chan, first breakfast, ate eggs, declared them good. Weather: partly cloudy, seventy percent chance of emotional breakthroughs."

Alexis ate another bite. Then another. Jordan counted without looking like he was counting. Six. Seven. Eight. Chloe’s fingers twitched against her mug. She was counting too.

Kumiko’s phone buzzed on the counter. Her face went through several expressions and settled between excited and terrified.

"Um."

"What." Chloe set down her coffee.

"Lila-san is asking about the stream numbers. The VOD is at eight thousand views and climbing, and she wants to know if you want to do a collab next week."

"A collab."

"With her. Live. On her channel." Kumiko held up the phone. "She says you have voice, she has reach, together you could be dangerous."

Chloe’s hand moved to her stomach and pressed flat under the henley, over a softness that might have been the baby and might have been breakfast. She didn’t speak for a long moment.

Jordan knew what the hand was doing. Eight thousand views was eight thousand strangers with a pause button. Lila’s channel was seventeen thousand more, and every one of them could screenshot a streak of blue hair and go looking for where else they’d seen it.

"Tell her I’ll think about it."

"She says thinking is for people who have time to waste, and you don’t." Another buzz. "She also says your high note in the second verse made her cry and she hates crying, so you owe her mascara money."

"Lila doesn’t wear mascara."

"She says that’s beside the point. She says everything is beside the point except the high note."

Alexis’s chopsticks had stopped halfway to her mouth. She was watching the two of them volley, the shorthand of people who had been navigating each other’s edges for months, like someone outside a house in winter looking at a fireplace through the window.

"Do you two always talk like that?"

"Like what?" Kumiko said.

"Like you already know what the other one’s going to say."

"She never knows what I’m going to say," Chloe said.

"I always know," Kumiko said. "I just like hearing it."

Jordan’s phone buzzed. Unknown number.

This is Catherine Van Der Berg. We need to discuss my daughter’s absence from last night’s dinner. Call me at your earliest convenience.

The eggs in his mouth turned into a texture he would associate, for the rest of his life, with being audited.

He read it three times. The words declined to rearrange themselves into something less terrifying.

"What?" Chloe said.

He turned the phone around. Her face ran the sequence in under a second: confusion, recognition, then the flat calm she used on landlords.

"She has your number."

"Apparently."

"How does she have your number?"

"No idea." Somebody had given it to her. Catherine Van Der Berg did not look up numbers herself.

He ran the list anyway. Alexis’s friends. Harrison, maybe, if Alexis had ever said his name where Harrison could hear it. Anyone with a PCA directory and a reason to be useful to a woman like that. It was a long list, and every name on it belonged to somebody who owed Catherine more than they owed him.

Kumiko leaned over and went pale. "Um. That’s Alexis-chan’s mother. That’s the person who decided which ring size Alexis-chan would be on the day."

Jordan turned the screen toward Alexis without letting go of the phone. She read it once, slowly.

"There’s a period after convenience."

"Is that bad?"

"She only uses periods when she’s already decided."

Alexis set her chopsticks down. The color left her face, and her hand went straight to her neck, pressing on the cord Jordan had found at Heisler Park.

"She knows."

"She doesn’t know anything," Chloe said. "She knows you didn’t show up last night. If she knew where you were, she wouldn’t be texting Jordan. She’d be calling the police."

"My mother doesn’t call the police. My mother handles things." Alexis’s breathing had gone shallow. "She has an estate office. She has a man named Martin who once made a paternity claim in Monaco disappear between the fish course and dessert."

"You’re not a problem."

"To her I am. I’ve been a problem she’s managed since birth. Now I’m a problem that didn’t show up to dinner."

At your earliest convenience. Polite. Almost pleasant. Jordan opened his note and added a section.

COMPLICATIONS:

Catherine Van Der Berg has my phone number

This is extremely bad

I need a plan

I need several plans

I need a plan for when the plans fail

He put the phone face down and looked at Alexis.

"Your mom wants me to call her."

"Don’t."

"I wasn’t planning to."

"She’ll find another way. She always does." Her knuckles were white on the cord. "You don’t understand what she’s like. She doesn’t lose. She doesn’t accept no. She rearranges the world until the answer is yes."

"Then we rearrange it first."

Over her mug, Chloe looked at him, and he watched her decide not to say with what money. She would say it later. Upstairs. With a pad and a pen.

Alexis stared at him, eyes wet at the edges. Nothing left of the girl who had swept through PCA like she owned it. Just a girl in borrowed clothes with nowhere else to go.

"How?"

Eighteen thousand and change. A quest with no instructions. A System that had never once handed him something impossible.

"I’m working on it."