Page 102 of Modern Romance June 2025 1-4

I want to shout at him. Maybe throw something. And the fact I even have the urge is shocking.

I’ve worked hard these past years to completely divorce myself from the kind of life I had growing up. If not to entirelyforgivemy father’s inability to be anything but weak, then to at least stop dwelling on it. And to move past my stepmother’s need to forever belittle and demean me because she hated any remnants of my mother, the woman my father loved first, since there was no changing it.

My mother died a few months after giving birth to me. She was told to me in stories, growing up. That was all I had when my stepmother got done purging the house of the pictures and mementos she claimed made my father grumpy and me impossible. My mother became a bedtime story my father told me in a low whisper so no one else would hear.

I became my mother’s twin as I grew, looking like her in every way and thereby ensuring that my stepmother would hate me.

And she did.

It had been a loud and fraught childhood home, with rages at the dinner table, shrieked accusations at the slightest provocation, and bitter rants that we were all forced to attend to until my stepmother’s temper was satiated. I have long since accepted that there will never be a good reason for the way she made me the target for all of her ire, aside from the cruel jealousy that seemed to rule her, or for my father’s inability to defend me from her.

Instead, I spend my life sorting out other people’s mysteries, and finding them answers. I couldn’t find answers myself, because there is no answer to a problem like my stepmother. She simply is who she is, willing and only too happy to cause damage wherever she goes.

I decided when I left that I would get other answers.

And maybe someday that will feel like healing.

But because of my beginnings and how I left at eighteen—in the middle of the night, with her shrieking behind me to spur me on—I treasure calmness. Serenity. Keeping my cool under any and all circumstances.

It feels like virtue after some fifteen years with a woman like my stepmother.

I’ve made this virtue my entire personality, in fact. She told me no one could ever love a sneaky, nasty liar like me. I told her that if I was those things, she made me into them. I’ve spent these years on my own proving that she was always wrong about me, that I do good things, that Iamgood.

I like to think I prove this in my work. That one little white lie doesn’t cancel out the questions I’ve answered and the problems I’ve solved.

I have no idea why it’s so hard to hold onto all that—tome—while staring back at this man.

“Tell me how you think this is going to go,” I say, and it’s a fight to soundmeasuredandeven, but I tell myself that’s how I would sound if there really was a Luc Garnier I could raise with a phone call. “You are an impostor. You must know that there’s no possible way I’m simply going to…go along with whatever it is you’re planning here, do you?”

Again, that smile of his, and every time I see it, it seems to find new parts of me to bloom in, dark and gold and problematic. “My dear Annagret, you have no choice but to do exactly that. Surely you know this.”

I flush, feeling red and angry. And perilously close to breaking some of my longest held vows.

He moves then, and I don’t know why I get the impression that he has to force himself into action. As if he’s as held tight in thisthingbetween us as I am, but thinking such a thing seems to make thebloomingmore intense.

I watch as he crosses the office to stand at the bank of windows and look out at the view. This sparkling sprawl of Manhattan there before us thatImade possible. Because it’s easy enough to have a dingy office somewhere unremarkable.

But a place like this? With a view likethat?

It’s my sweat and tears that he’s looking at, and I want to tell him so but it feels too revealing. Too…exposing. He might have taken me by surprise this morning, but that doesn’t mean I intend to roll over and show him my belly.

Though rolling around with him, maybe right here on the floor, and showing him my belly is suddenly all I can think about. And it turns out I don’t need to breathe for that, because he—

Stop it,I order myself.He’s a con man.

And he’s talking. “You should view this as an opportunity,” he tells me, and he sounds…something like serious. “For a little while, your Luc Garnier will be here, in the flesh. I’m certain that you can make use of that.”

I’m not sure I like the fact that I was thinking of writhing on the floor while he was thinking in terms of strategy. I feel like I’m letting myself down already.

That might be why I make a scoffing sound that definitely errs on the side ofaggressive.“So you’re doing me a favor?”

“You can call it whatever you like. It will not make a difference. But this myth of yours is now a man.”

I might sound aggressive, but inside, I’m too aware it’s nothing but panic. How can he possibly know this? Maybeguessing the truthisn’t wholly surprising, but he’s not acting as if this is a guess. He’s acting as if he knows the truth as well as I do.

I don’t understand how.

Or why he’s so confident that he’s right, even in the face of my denials.

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