Chapter 2

The second time I saw Theo Madden, he was standing in the poetry aisle of a bookstore I'd chosen precisely because it had no security cameras.

I'd picked it for that reason. No cameras, poor sightlines, a back exit through the loading dock. It was the kind of place where a woman could disappear if she needed to, or where a man could corner her if she didn't.

Theo thought he was the predator. But I'd been choosing the terrain since I was sixteen.

He was holding a collection of Neruda's sonnets, which told me he'd done his homework. My library records—sealed, private, deeply illegal for him to access—would have shown a teenage Maren checking out Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair eleven times. The girl who'd slept in a servants' closet had memorized those poems by flashlight.

Now he was here, holding the same book, wearing the same cologne, looking at me like fate had delivered him gifts.

Fate was a generous word for what I'd engineered.

"Maren."

He said my name like it had weight. Like he'd practiced it in the mirror. Maybe he had.

I tilted my head, letting a strand of hair fall across my face. The fall was calculated. Everything I did was calculated. "I'm sorry—do I know you?"

It was the first loaded sentence of the evening. The first shot across the bow.

He smiled, and I understood immediately why Lily had chosen him. The smile was lethal. It started in his eyes—dark, warm, a little sad—and spread to his mouth like a confession. It was the smile of a man who'd been broken before and survived. Women saw that smile and wanted to fix him. Or be broken by him. Either way, they came closer.

"You don't remember me," he said, but not with offense. With something gentler. "We met three years ago. A benefit for the Lyndon Foundation. You were eighteen, I think. You stood near the east entrance and said nothing for two hours, and then you left without saying goodbye."

I let my face flicker through emotions like a slot machine: confusion, doubt, a dangerous flicker of recognition. "I—that was a long time ago."

"I remember everything about it."

No, he didn't. He remembered what Lily's file told him. But the performance was convincing. I'd give him that.

I'd been studying Theo Madden for six weeks. I knew that his favorite food was sushi, that he'd spent a summer in rehab at nineteen, that his mother had died of a stroke when he was twenty-two, that his father had remarried within the year. I knew that he'd graduated from Yale with honors and then vanished from his family's social calendar for eighteen months—a gap that my sources had not yet pieced together. I knew that he owed money to a man named Harrow who collected debts with a box cutter.

And I knew that six weeks ago, my sister Lily had walked into a bar in the financial district, slid a photograph across a polished mahogany table, and said, "I need you to ruin her."

I wasn't supposed to know that. But knowledge was the only currency I respected.

The man who now stood before me, holding Neruda, had accepted the job.

Now we were here, in this bookshop I'd selected with a tactician's care, and he was playing his role beautifully. I had to admit it. The man had talent.

"I'm sorry," I said, softening my voice. "I'm not—I don't usually get approached in bookstores. It's a little disorienting." I let a small, self-deprecating laugh escape. The sound was perfect: fragile but brave. I'd practiced it in a mirror until my throat ached.

"Then let me be less disorienting." He extended his hand. "Theo Madden. I live three blocks from here. I come in for the poetry section every Thursday."

A lie. He'd never set foot in this store before tonight. But his hand was warm and dry, and his grip was exactly firm enough. A handshake that said trust me without saying it loudly.

"Maren," I said. "Just Maren."

"Maren," he repeated, and the way he said it—slow, savoring, like he was tasting the vowel—was identical to the way he'd said it to Lily. I'd watched the recording a hundred times. The man was consistent.

But there was something different now. A micro-expression when he looked at me. Something that flickered across his face when his eyes met mine and he saw that I wasn't flinching.

Surprise. Genuine surprise.

He'd expected someone broken.

I let my shoulder relax, let him see me soften. "You said you remember everything. What was I wearing?"

The question threw him—not visibly, but I saw his jaw tighten by a degree. It wasn't in the file. He hadn't prepared for it.

But he recovered fast. "Blue. A dark blue dress. You kept pulling at the sleeve like you wanted to leave."

I hadn't been at that benefit. I'd been scrubbing baseboards in my parents' house. But I let my eyes widen. "That's... yeah. That's right." I looked away, the movement shy. "I'm sorry, this is strange. You're a stranger, and I'm—I should go."

I turned to leave, giving him the choice: let me go, or chase.

He chose chase.

"Maren." He took one step forward, palm raised, not touching me. The restraint was elegant. "I'm not a stranger. I'm a man who's spent three years trying to find you."

He sold it so well that for one dangerous second, I almost believed him.

But I'd been sold the same story by better men. My own father, for one. Teachers who promised I was special before my parents paid them to change my grade. Counselors who told me to be grateful for a roof over my head while Lily's shoes cost more than my monthly food budget.

Everyone was selling something. Theo Madden was selling a fantasy: a man who remembered a girl no one else had bothered to see.

I bought it with the face of a woman starved for exactly that kind of attention.

"That's a very strange thing to say to someone."

"I know." He smiled again—self-conscious now, almost shy. The shift was breathtaking. In twenty seconds, he'd gone from confident to vulnerable. "I rehearsed it, and it still came out wrong."

The admission was disarming. It was also the first genuine thing I'd heard from him.

Something in my chest tightened, and I hated it.

The problem with studying your enemies is that you learn their wounds. Theo's mother died when he was twenty-two—the same age he'd entered rehab. The timeline was a map of grief. A boy who'd lost the only person who loved him unconditionally, then spent a year trying to erase himself with substances before climbing back into a life he clearly didn't want. The calluses on his hands were new. The expensive suit was borrowed. The cologne was a comfort smell, something he'd worn since his mother bought him his first bottle.

I knew all of it.

And I still felt the pull.

That was the part that made me angry. Not at him. At the universe for giving Lily's weapon such inconvenient depth.

"I should go," I said again, but I didn't move.

"Then go." His voice was soft, no pressure. "I'll be here next Thursday. Same time. Same aisle." He held up the Neruda. "I'll be the one with the sonnets."

I allowed myself one small smile. "I thought you came here every Thursday."

"Then you have no excuse not to find me."

The line was good. I'd give him that. It was gentle and clever and it invited me to make the next move while making me feel like it was mine.

I let him see my walls crack. A tiny fissure, right at the corner of my mouth. "I don't date."

"Who asked you to date?"

"I don't do... whatever this is."

"Neither do I." His eyes held mine. "But I've spent three years wondering what a girl in a blue dress was thinking when she left that benefit. I'd like to know."

He was good. He was so good.

I pulled a card from my bag—not my real one, but a number routed to a phone I kept in a drawer, charged and monitored. "Fine. But I don't like surprises."

"I'll keep that in mind." He took the card like it was made of glass. "Maren."

That was the moment he made his first real mistake.

He looked down at the card, and I saw his expression shift, just for an instant. A flicker of something like guilt. Like a man who'd just won a hand of poker and suddenly realized the other player was betting more than she could afford to lose.

I memorized it.

Then I walked out of the bookstore, counted to sixty, and doubled back through the alley. I didn't go home. I went to the café across the street, ordered tea I wouldn't drink, and watched him through the window.

He stayed in the poetry aisle for eleven minutes after I left. Then he pulled out his phone and made a call. I watched his lips. I'd been reading lips since I was four years old—my grandmother had gone deaf in her final years, and I'd learned to survive in silence.

"She's perfect," he said. And then he laughed, and the laugh was not the warm one from the bookstore. This laugh was hollow. "Easy. She's exactly what you said she'd be. Broken as hell."

Broken as hell.

I sat with the words. They didn't sting. They clarified.

Then he said something I didn't expect.

"Three weeks," he said into the phone, and there was something in the set of his shoulders—a tension that hadn't been there in the bookstore. "After that, I'm out. You understand? I'll do what you asked, and then we're done."

A pause.

"You'd better," he said.

And hung up.

I watched him for a long time after that. He didn't leave the bookstore. He stood in the poetry aisle, holding the Neruda, and he didn't move. His face was turned away from the window, but I didn't need to see it.

I already knew what a man looked like when he was trapped.

The snare was set. The question was whether I was the hunter—or the bait.

That night, I went home to my cramped one-bedroom apartment and didn't sleep. Instead, I sat at my kitchen table with a laptop and the lights off, and I started building the file that would destroy my sister.

I called it The Blue Dress.