Chapter 4: The drive up

The car smells like new leather and whatever cologne James wore to the office. Nadia adjusted the seat for the third time, though it wasn't actually uncomfortable. She was just looking for something to do with her hands besides exist in the passenger seat for four hours straight.

James pulled out of the parking garage with the kind of smooth precision that probably extended to everything he did. Of course he was good at driving.

"Bluetooth is set up," he said. "Your phone or mine?"

"Yours," Nadia said immediately. "I want to know what the CFO listens to. Educational purposes. I'm building a psychological profile."

"No, you're not."

"Partially lying, yes. Mostly I want ammunition."

He didn't smile, but his hands adjusted on the wheel like he was considering it. "I listen to music like a normal person."

"That's what someone who listens to nothing but financial podcasts would say."

"I don't listen to financial podcasts."

"Smooth jazz?"

"No."

"Yacht rock? Heavy metal? Children's lullabies for executive relaxation?"

"You're going to try every genre until something lands."

"I have four hours to work with," Nadia said cheerfully. "I'm patient. Also I have a captive audience, which is arguably more important."

He picked up his phone from the cup holder and handed it back to her without another word. Nadia scrolled through his Spotify, expecting... she wasn't sure what. The playlists had names like "Saturday morning" and "running—try to kill yourself" and one simply labeled "the playlist." She opened it and found everything mixed together: The National, Bon Iver, some Radiohead, early Arctic Monkeys next to Stevie Wonder and an embarrassing amount of Fleetwood Mac.

"'Rhiannon,'" she read aloud. "Multiple times. This song appears five times across different lists."

"Good song."

"That's not a defense, that's an obsession."

But she queued it up anyway, and the opening guitar started—that haunting progression, that voice—and James merged onto the highway with the kind of focus that suggested he was planning military operations instead of just driving to a lake house.

The song filled the car. Nadia watched Chicago blur past the window, the familiar melody pulling at something in her chest. She'd listened to this song probably three thousand times over the years. It had the kind of staying power of music that actually meant something, that cut through you if you weren't paying attention.

"So," she said, turning to him, "family reunion protocol. What am I walking into? And don't say 'a normal family reunion' because you wouldn't recognize normal if it sent you a formal invitation."

"Normal family reunion," he said anyway.

"Be specific, Whitmore. I need details. Angry exes? Competitive siblings? Someone who gets drunk and cries about their divorce?"

"My brother gets competitive."

"About what?"

"Everything. Sports, career, who Dad's prouder of. He's a lawyer."

"So what, you're the finance golden child and he's the law golden child and you're both secretly dying for recognition?"

"Something like that."

James took the exit ramp with deliberate smoothness. Nadia let him have the silence for a moment. She'd learned that his silences weren't empty—they were him thinking, processing, deciding what information to share and what to withhold.

"My mother will want to know about your family," he said eventually. "Your job, your background, how we met. She collects details like they're evidence."

"Let me guess—like you?"

"Not like me."

"You absolutely collect details about people. I've seen you at events. You notice everything and say nothing and then you probably catalog it all like you're building case files on everyone you meet."

He glanced at her briefly, his attention only half-leaving the road. "You've been thinking about my cataloging."

"Because it's strange behavior, James. That's objectively strange behavior, and I'm not comfortable with it."

"I notice things about people," he said, and the simplicity of it somehow made it worse. "It's not secret. It's not malicious. It's just how I see."

Nadia felt something catch in her chest at the honesty of it. At the way he'd said it—not defensive, not apologetic, just factual. James Whitmore was a person who noticed things about people. He'd probably been doing it since childhood, collecting details like artifacts.

"What do you notice about me?" The question came out before she could stop it.

He was quiet for so long she thought he might not answer.

"That you assume everyone wants something from you," he said finally. "That you listen better than you let on. That you have a nervous habit of repeating the last thing someone says when you're uncomfortable, and you're uncomfortable most of the time, especially around me."

"Okay, that's definitely creepy. That's full-spectrum creepy, actually."

"You asked."

"I asked rhetorically. I didn't consent to a full personality audit."

He didn't respond, and Nadia turned back to the window, aware of her own smile. It was there, sitting in the corner of her mouth, uninvited and difficult to dismiss.

"Your mother's going to ask about your feelings," she said, redirecting hard. "About me. What should I expect?"

"She'll believe what I tell her."

"Which is?"

"That you're important."

Nadia's jaw tightened. That wasn't in the script. That wasn't the kind of thing people said about fake engagements. That was the kind of thing people said when they meant something.

"Professional important," she clarified, not quite asking. Stating the ground rules. "As in, you're important to your career goals."

"Sure."

But he'd said it wrong. The word came a beat too late, like he was catching himself, backtracking, and James Whitmore didn't backtrack. He moved forward in straight lines. He'd just proven it by changing the rules without asking permission first.

"Sure," she repeated flatly.

"Your job is important to you. That's not a character flaw, Nadia. It's what I notice about you."

She turned the music up instead of responding to that. She wasn't equipped to have this conversation, not in a car, not for four hours, not with nowhere to go and nothing but the highway ahead of them.

They drove through the city proper and out toward the lake. Somewhere around the ninety-minute mark, her nervous energy started to dissipate. The car was warm. The music wasn't terrible. James didn't try to fill the silence, which meant she didn't have to perform her way through it. She could just exist next to him without commentary or interpretation.

She scrolled through his playlists while he drove, just scrolling, not really looking for anything. There was one labeled "concentration" that was all classical. One called "angry" that was surprisingly soft guitar and female vocals. There was one labeled just "Nadia" and she stopped completely at that, her thumb hovering over it, not clicking because she already knew it would mean something and she wasn't prepared for that kind of honesty.

"Don't," James said quietly, though she hadn't said anything. Hadn't asked any questions.

"Don't what?"

"Overthink the playlist labeled 'Nadia.'"

"Okay, no, that's exactly the thing I'm going to overthink. That's the literal definition of overthinking—a playlist with your fake fiancée's actual name on it."

"It was created six months ago."

"James."

"Nadia."

She put the phone down, couldn't look at him. Couldn't think about what it meant that he'd been creating playlists with her name on them while she was busy assuming he was silently judging her from four desks over.

The highway stretched ahead of them, long and empty, and they were past the city now, into that flat stretch of Illinois where the sky was just starting to turn gold at the edges. The drive stretched out. Nadia felt her shoulders drop, the tension she'd been holding slowly releasing into the leather seat.

A song came on that she recognized immediately. An old one, a little sad, the kind of thing that sounds like late-night introspection written by someone who actually understood what they were writing about. It was one of her favorites. Something she'd had on repeat through a bad breakup three years ago, the kind of song that knew her inside and out.

She didn't expect James to even know it existed.

He started singing.

Quietly, like he wasn't aware he was doing it, his voice just joining the original track naturally, low and a little rough around the edges, and Nadia felt something in her stomach complete a full vertical turn. His voice wasn't particularly trained or showy—it was fine, it was better than fine, it was actually very good—but that wasn't the point.

The point was that he knew this song. Knew it well enough to sing it without thinking, his eyes on the road, his attention still split between the highway and the music. Knew it well enough that it clearly meant something to him. Something real.

She catalogued it. Stored it in the same way he'd catalogued her nervous habits, her assumptions, her singular focus on her career. James Whitmore, CFO and grump and impossible man who had been noticing her for six months, listened to heartbreak songs. He drove four hours to a family reunion humming melancholy at the edges of his breath, and he did it like no one was watching.

The song ended and she didn't acknowledge it. Didn't acknowledge that she'd heard him or that she'd noticed or that she was now equally complicit in this strange symmetry of observation. He knew she paid attention. She just didn't think he'd caught her doing it too. But of course he had. He noticed everything.

The highway kept unfolding ahead of them. Another hour until the lake house. Another hour of forced proximity, of his cologne and his knowledge of her sad songs, of the way his hands sat on the steering wheel like they were exactly where they belonged.

She realized, about forty-five minutes later, that she'd been smiling for approximately two hours.

It wasn't performed. Wasn't a put-on or a social strategy or a deflection tactic deployed for professional purposes. It was just there, sitting in the corner of her mouth, a real thing that had nothing to do with strategy and everything to do with the fact that James Whitmore was singing backup to her favorite songs while driving through gold-hour light, like this was the most natural thing in the world.

She didn't stop it.