Chapter 8: The Chase Begins
The heavy door sighed shut behind her, sealing off the penthouse, the lilies, the ruin. Dee walked. The hallway stretched, an endless gallery of mirrored walls and brass fixtures, her own reflection moving with her—a tall, pale woman with shocked eyes, clutching a digital recorder like a weapon.
Her heels were too loud. Each click on the marble was a gunshot echo in the silent, opulent tunnel. She focused on the elevator bank at the far end, a small rectangle of silver. Just get to the elevator. Get down. Get out.
Then a rush of movement behind her. The suck of air as a door opened.
“Dee!”
His voice, raw and unfiltered, bounced off the walls. It was the voice from the voice notes, strained with panic.
She didn’t turn. She sped up, her hand already digging in her bag for the keycard, for anything. The elevator was thirty feet away. Twenty.
“Dee, please, wait!”
She heard his footsteps, quick and soft in loafers on the carpet runner. He was catching up. She stabbed the down button with a rigid finger. A single, illuminated arrow. Come on.
He stopped a few paces behind her, close enough that she could feel the displaced air, smell the faint, clean scent of him—soap and that same aged oak from the whiskey. She kept her back to him, staring at the brushed steel elevator doors, at her own distorted, furious reflection.
“You don’t have to forgive me,” he said, the words tumbling out fast. “You can hate me. I probably would. But just… let me say it. Let me explain. Not as him. As me. As the guy who worries your coffee’s gone cold while you’re writing.”
The mention of the coffee, their private, mundane shorthand, was a masterstroke of emotional warfare. It sliced through the professional outrage and found the softer, bruised flesh underneath. She felt a hot pressure behind her eyes.
The elevator dinged, a cheerful, mundane sound. The doors slid open, revealing an empty, mirrored box.
She didn’t move.
He didn’t move either. He just stood there, breathing a little heavily. “Please.”
Slowly, she turned. The anger was a cold, hard shell, but it was cracking, and the hurt was seeping out, bright and liquid. Her eyes glittered with it. “Explain what, Matt?” She used his name like a slap. “The lie? Or the months of performance? Was any of it real? Or was I just… research? Method acting for some future role as a normal person?”
He flinched. “It was all real. Every word. That’s the hell of it.”
“Bullshit.” The word was a whisper. She took a step toward him, into the space between the open elevator and where he stood. The doors started to close, bumped her shoulder, and retracted with a soft whirr. “You curated a version of yourself you thought I’d like. A non-famous, deep, sensitive guy. It’s a brand. I just didn’t know I was buying it.”
“That’s not true.” He ran a hand through his hair, leaving it disheveled. The perfect composure was gone, shattered. “It was the only place I didn’t have to be a brand. With you, I was just… a man. A frustrated, hopeful, sometimes funny, often tired man. The fame is the costume, Dee. What I had with you was the thing underneath.”
“You had nothing with me,” she spat, but the force was gone. It was trembling now. “You had a fiction. I shared things—stupid, private things about my family, my fears about my career going stale, how much I hated my apartment’s leaky faucet—with a construct. You knew everything about me. I knew nothing about you.”
“You knew me!” The intensity in his voice shocked her. It was low, fervent. “You knew I’m terrified of being irrelevant by fifty. You knew I think my greatest performance was in a community theatre in Pasadena when I was nineteen because my mom cried. You knew I have a morbid fear of seagulls after one stole a hot dog right out of my hand in Santa Monica. You knew the real stuff. The stupid, human stuff. The stuff that doesn’t end up in profiles.” He took a step closer. The elevator doors gave up and closed again, leaving them stranded in the hallway. “The name, the face, the job… that’s the biography. You got the autobiography.”
She looked away, out a floor-to-ceiling window at the grid of the city. The clouds had moved in, dulling the gold to a flat, steely grey. “Why? If it was so precious, why the secrecy? Was it a game?”
“It was a sanctuary.” He said it simply. “And I was a coward. I was scared that the second you knew, it would become… this.” He gestured between them, at the charged, painful space. “It would become a transaction. An opportunity. Or it would just… evaporate. Because how could what we built compete with the idea of me? The celebrity. I watched it happen. I watched you piece it together in there. You saw the celebrity first. And then you saw the lie. You never got to just see… me.”
Dee’s throat was tight. She remembered the jolt of recognition, the cold detective work of matching his phrases. He was right. The man she’d known had been overwritten in an instant by the actor, the secret-keeper.
She looked back at him, really looked. The striking features were the same, but the expression was one she’d never seen in a magazine spread. It was open, ravaged, hopeful, and terrified. It was the face of someone who had just gambled their only treasure and lost.
“What do you want from me now?” she asked, her voice hollow.
“A chance,” he said. He didn’t touch her. He kept his hands at his sides, clenched. “One conversation. Where you know exactly who I am. Where I don’t have to hide a single damn thing. And if after that you want to walk away, I’ll delete the app. I’ll never bother you again. You can write whatever you want about me. I won’t stop you.”
She glanced down at the recorder in her hand. The interview. The betrayal. It was all evidence on a tiny SD card. She could destroy him with it. A part of her, the sharp, betrayed journalist, wanted to.
The other part, the woman who had laughed until she cried at his impressions of his terrible director, who had felt seen and tethered by his messages, that part was still there. Bruised, but breathing.
The city murmured below, a distant, indifferent roar.
“Not here,” she said finally, the words scraping out. “Not in this hotel.”
Relief, raw and devastating, flooded his features. He nodded, too quickly. “Anywhere. You name it.”
She thought of the diner he’d mentioned. The one with the bad coffee and the Elvis mural. A place from his past, a place he’d shared when he was just a username. A level playing field of terrible decor and worse coffee.
“The diner,” she said. “The one on 44th. You know it?”
A faint, sad smile touched his lips. “Yeah,” he said. “I know it. It’s still there.”
“Meet me there. Tomorrow. Ten AM.” She turned back to the elevator button, pressed it. The arrow lit up again.
“I’ll be there,” he said to her back.
The elevator doors slid shut, severing the connection. Dee sagged against the mirrored wall, her breath leaving her in a shuddering wave. Her reflection showed a stranger—pale, lips pressed into a bloodless line. The descent felt like falling forever.
In the hallway, Matt stood frozen. The silence rushed back in, louder than before. He turned and faced the penthouse door, a barrier as imposing as any he’d ever faced. He didn’t go back inside.
Instead, he pulled out his phone. He stared at their chat thread, the last message his four-leaf clover. His thumb hovered. He typed three words: I’m so sorry. He deleted them. Nothing he typed there would land right. Not now.
He pocketed the phone and walked toward the stairwell, needing the physical burn in his legs, the jarring impact of concrete steps. He pushed through the fire door and started down, his footsteps echoing in the hollow, gray space.
Dee’s apartment welcomed her with its familiar mundanity—the faint smell of yesterday’s coffee, the stack of unread newspapers by the door, the persistent, rhythmic drip-drip from the kitchen faucet she’d complained to him about. She threw her bag on the couch. The recorder landed with a soft thud.
She paced. The confrontation replayed on a loop in her head—his voice, his eyes, his devastating accuracy. You knew the real stuff. Anger warred with a treacherous, aching sympathy. He’d built a trap out of honesty and she’d walked right into it.
Her professional editor brain, a circuitry that always eventually fired, clicked on. The interview. The lost afternoon. The gaping hole in her deadline.
She snatched her notebook from her bag. It fell open to her shorthand from the penthouse: fear of scale – good. The page was barely filled. A flush of professional shame heated her skin. She’d gotten nothing. He’d derailed everything.
Her eyes fell on the forgotten question list, typed neatly, tucked into the back of the notebook. Standard, incisive, boring. Questions for Matt Bomer, the actor. Not for the man who knew her leaky faucet was code for her fear of things falling apart.
A hard, clean idea cut through the emotional static. It was brutal. It was perfect.
She grabbed her phone. She found his contact—not the app, but the number his publicist had provided days ago. She typed a message, her thumbs hitting the keys with sharp, definitive taps.
You want a chance? she wrote. Start here. AND ANSWER THE DAMN QUESTIONS IN MY NOTEBOOK. MY EDITOR NEEDS THE INTERVIEW BY THE END OF THE EVENING. SO YOU HAVE TWO HOURS, MR BOMER. CONSIDER THAT MY CONSOLATION PRIZE.
She attached a scanned image of the typed question list. Twenty-seven questions about craft, fame, and his upcoming film. Not a single one asked who he really was.
She hit send before she could think.
The message delivered. Read receipts were on. She watched the tiny text change to Read. The ellipsis appeared. It danced. It disappeared. It appeared again.
Her breath caught. This was the new battleground.
His reply came a minute later, just text, no voice note.
Two hours. Understood. And Dee?
She waited, her heart a hard knot in her throat.
The coffee at the diner is still paint thinner. I’ll bring you tea.
She didn’t answer. She put the phone face down on the coffee table and walked to the kitchen. She filled the kettle, her hands steady. The drip from the faucet counted out the seconds. She listened to it, and for the first time, she didn’t just hear an annoyance. She heard a rhythm. She heard waiting.
Across the city, in a silent car moving downtown, Matt opened the attachment. He skimmed the clinical questions. He opened a blank document on his laptop. The cursor blinked.
He started typing. For the first time in his career, he began to tell the truth.