Chapter 411 | Complete is a Luxury

Chapter 411: 411 | Complete is a Luxury

Jordan let that sit for a second, then let it sit for another one, because getting called smart by Chloe Kim happened roughly as often as a solar eclipse and he wanted to feel the entire shadow pass over him.

"Say it again."

"No."

"You said it was the smartest thing I’ve said since we met. That includes the debate. The debate where I made Cameron Mitchell’s mouth open and close like a fish having a stroke."

"I’m aware of what it includes. I said it out loud on purpose and I regret it already." She reached over and pushed his knee, which did nothing, since he weighed significantly more than her now and the shove had all the force of a disappointed cat. "You get one. Don’t build a religion out of it."

He was absolutely going to build a religion out of it. He’d already started drafting the hymns.

The thing was, she wasn’t wrong about the mechanism, and she also wasn’t wrong about the part she hadn’t said out loud, which was that Jordan had spent three weeks locking his family out of his life over a line of corporate copy written by the same entity that gave him the power to summon tumbleweeds during awkward silences. He had a magic phone that had made him rich, ripped, and unreasonably good at karaoke, and he’d treated one paragraph of its flavor text like a diagnosis from an oncologist.

That was the part that stung. Not the trait. The three weeks.

His mother had texted him a photo of a dog she saw outside the Irvine store on a Thursday and he’d replied with the word cute and then set his phone face down like it was radioactive.

"Saturday," he said.

"Saturday." Chloe pulled her leg out from under herself and stretched it across his lap, the borrowed shirt sliding higher on her thigh. She didn’t fix it. She never fixed it. "Giuliano’s again, probably, because your mother has decided that’s the family restaurant now. I’ll wear the blue dress. Your father will notice I’m not drinking wine and he will not say anything, and then he will say something in the parking lot."

"He’s going to know."

"Your father’s going to know by the salad course. Your mother’s going to know when I turn down the wine. Cassie’s going to know the second I walk in the door because she reads people for a living and I’m going to be standing next to you doing the thing where I put my hand on your back." Chloe flexed her toes against his stomach. "So we don’t try to hide it past the appetizers. We control the reveal. I’d rather hand it to them than have your sister excavate it out of your face over bread."

"You’ve thought about this."

"I’ve had four days and a spreadsheet."

Of course she had. The woman had built a NOVEMBER tab before she’d even taken a test. Somewhere in that laptop there was a cell labeled something like PARENTAL DISCLOSURE with a projected emotional volatility index and a fallback plan involving her mother’s dry cleaners.

Through the wall, Kumiko’s music shifted. Something with strings, slower, which in Kumiko’s sewing taxonomy meant she’d reached a stage requiring precision and had stopped humming along. Jordan had learned to read her playlist like weather.

"She’s going to want to come Saturday," he said.

"She’s going to want to come Saturday and she cannot come Saturday, and she already knows that, and she’s going to cry about it in a way that makes both of us feel like we drowned a puppy." Chloe’s mouth flattened. "I’ll handle it tonight. She responds better if it comes from me. If it comes from you she assumes she’s being deprioritized and then we lose the whole evening to reassurance."

"That’s cold."

"That’s accurate. Those aren’t the same." She looked at him over the tops of her knees. "I love her. That’s why I know exactly which sentences break her."

There it was. Chloe Kim’s entire operating system in one line, delivered flat, no music behind it. Everybody in Jordan’s life kept doing this to him, saying devastating things in the voice you’d use to read a parking sign.

He shifted his hand to her ankle and held it there, thumb moving over the bone.

"You know what the actual problem is," he said.

"You have several."

"The actual problem is I stopped answering my mom’s texts and now the story of why I stopped is a magic app, and I can’t tell her that, so whatever I say on Saturday is going to be a lie." He rolled the joint of her ankle under his thumb. "I told you the truth about the System. I told Kumiko about the inheritance. Everybody in my life gets a different version of me and I’m running out of places to keep them."

Chloe didn’t rush to fill the gap, which was one of the four hundred things he’d come to depend on about her. She let the sentence exist for a while, sitting there ugly and unaddressed, before she pulled her leg back and got up onto her knees on the cushion.

"You’re not lying to your mother about the app," she said. "You’re lying about the app. There’s a difference and you’re too tired to find it right now."

"Enlighten me."

"You disappeared for three weeks because you were scared. That’s true. You’re going to show up Saturday because you decided to stop being scared. That’s also true. Everything you say to her can be true. You just don’t get to be complete." She crossed the last few inches and settled into his lap, one knee on either side of his hips, and she did it with the same absence of ceremony she brought to lease paperwork. "Complete is a luxury. Nobody at that table is complete. Your father hasn’t been complete since 1998."

"You’ve decided a lot of things about my father."

"I’ve met him twice and he apologized to me in a restaurant. I know everything about your father."