Chapter 13: The Escape to New York
The silence in Chloe’s apartment was a different creature. It wasn’t the polished, expensive quiet of Matt’s penthouse, which always felt like a held breath. This was a lived-in silence, stuffed into the corners with half-finished canvases, stacked vinyl records, and the faint, greasy scent of last night’s takeout. It hummed with the radiator’s occasional clank and the distant, rhythmic bass from the apartment below.
Dee had been there for twenty-six hours. She knew this because she’d watched the light move across her sister’s bedroom ceiling, tracing the water stain that looked like a side-profile of Winston Churchill. She’d gotten up once to pee, her body moving with the stiff, careful deliberation of a convalescent. The suitcase she’d haphazardly packed sat by the door, unopened, a monument to her flight.
Chloe didn’t ask. She brought tea. She left grilled cheese sandwiches on the nightstand. She sat on the edge of the bed and talked about her graphic design clients, about the horrible date she’d been on, about their mother’s new obsession with pickleball. Her voice was a steady, undemanding stream.
On the second afternoon, the light turned a thick, golden syrup. Dee pushed herself up against the headboard. The pillows smelled like Chloe’s shampoo and, faintly, like her own sweat.
“I need to disappear,” Dee said. Her voice was raspy from disuse, the words landing blunt in the sunny room.
Chloe, who was cross-legged on the floor attempting to re-string a guitar, didn’t look up. “Okay. For how long?”
“I don’t know. Until I remember what my own thoughts sound like without his voice running commentary in the background.” She picked at a thread on the duvet. “I need to remember who I was before I started framing my entire life around waiting for a text from Matt Bomer.”
Chloe nodded, her focus on a stubborn tuning peg. “Fair. That guy’s a black hole of charisma. Sucks all the light and common sense right out of the room.” She finally got the peg to turn, looking up. Her eyes, the same honey-brown as Dee’s but sharper, held no pity. Just a flat, assessing clarity. “You know he’s called seventeen times? Sent roughly a novella’s worth of texts. Sofia says he’s been camped out at your studio, too. Looking, and I quote, ‘like a beautifully sculpted war refugee.’”
A sliver of something hot and sick curled in Dee’s stomach. She ignored it. “I haven’t read them. I deleted the thread.”
“Good.” Chloe put the guitar aside and stood, brushing denim lint from her thighs. “Disappearing is a proactive move. I support it.” She walked to a high cabinet in the small kitchen, rummaged, and returned with a bottle of whiskey and two mismatched tumblers. She poured two generous fingers into each, handed one to Dee, and kept the other. She didn’t propose a toast. She just took a swallow, winced, and sat back down on the floor. “Then let’s get started. Lesson one: remembering Dee. She was a terrifying force of nature at fourteen who cut her own bangs with craft scissors and made them work. She told Mr. Hendley his breath smelled like dead hamsters to his face. She wanted to be a sculptor.”
Dee took a sip. The whiskey burned a clean, clarifying path down her throat. “I hated the mess of clay. The dust got everywhere.”
“But you liked the making. The having of an idea in your hands.” Chloe pointed a finger at her. “You switched to hair because it was living sculpture, you said. Transient art. You loved that it wasn’t permanent.”
The irony of that now was almost funny. She’d built something she thought was permanent—a friendship, a partnership, a love—on the most transient art form of all: the performance of his public image, with her as his backstage architect. Every haircut washed away. Every styled look red-carpeted and then forgotten. She was the queen of things that did not last.
“I need to go somewhere he wouldn’t think to look,” Dee said, the plan forming in jagged pieces as she spoke. “Somewhere that isn’t a beach or a spa. Somewhere… abrasive.”
Chloe grinned, a flash of real delight. “Now you’re talking. Aunt Ruth’s.”
The name landed with a thud. Their father’s sister, Ruth, lived on a fledgling organic farm in Vermont she called a “homestead,” but which everyone else called a “glorified mud patch with Wi-Fi.” She was seventy-two, built like a fire hydrant, and believed deodorant was a corporate conspiracy.
“She’s been asking for help putting up a new greenhouse,” Chloe continued. “Says the old one ‘succumbed to existential despair and a heavy snow.’ You’d be unpaid manual labor. You’d smell of compost and despair. Matt Bomer would never, in a million years, picture you there. It’s perfect.”
A vision arose: not of Matt, but of Elara Vance, her perfect skin flushed, her body moving in that specific, claiming rhythm. The memory was a physical scrape against her sternum. She welcomed the idea of hard, dirty, mind-numbing work. Of exhaustion so deep it would scour that image from the inside of her eyelids.
“Yes,” Dee said, the word definitive. “Tell her I’m coming. Tell her I’m strong and I don’t complain.”
Chloe snorted. “She’ll find out the truth soon enough.” She finished her whiskey. “What about the online stuff? Your ‘devoted following’?”
Dee looked at her phone, dark and silent on the nightstand. The instrument of her success and her daily tether to him. She thought of the curated posts, the behind-the-scenes clips that always, somehow, subtly featured him. His laugh off-camera, his hand accepting a coffee she’d bought, the back of his famous head in her chair. She had built her kingdom in the shadow of his palace.
“I’ll post something vague. A ‘digital detox’ message. Then I’ll go dark.” She met Chloe’s gaze. “I need to be a person who isn’t ‘seen’ for a while. I need to not perform.”
Chloe’s expression softened, just for a moment. “Aunt Ruth’s got three cows. They don’t give a shit about your follower count. Or your haircut.” She stood, taking both glasses. “I’ll book you a train ticket for tomorrow. Rustic, but not insane. You’ll have to change in White River Junction.” She paused at the bedroom door. “He’s going to keep trying, you know. This level of panic… it’s not his style. Something’s cracked.”
Dee looked at the ceiling again, at the water-stain Churchill. “Let him crack,” she said, and was surprised by the cool steadiness in her own voice. “I’m not his glue. Not anymore.”
After Chloe left, Dee picked up her phone. She powered it on. The screen bloomed with notifications, a cascading waterfall of his desperation. She didn’t open them. She went straight to her booking app, found the confirmation for the train north, and took a screenshot. Without overthinking it, she opened her social media, posted the screenshot of the ticket with the caption “Analog chapter. Back soon. x” and then, methodically, logged out of every account on the device.
She placed the phone back on the nightstand. It was just a slab of glass and metal now. It held no whispers, no ghosts, no future.
The evening settled in. The sounds of the Brooklyn street filtered up—a siren, laughter, a dog barking. For the first time in years, the noise didn’t feel like an interruption. It felt like a curtain falling on a long, sold-out run. She was finally, terribly, intermission. And for now, the quiet within her was no longer hollow. It was simply waiting.