Counterfeit

Alexandra Wentworth had been standing here, expressionless, for perhaps a quarter of an hour.

The lighting was meticulously calibrated. Inside the climate-controlled glass case, three-thousand-year-old gold lay like tamed fire. The Tutankhamun mask was a replica—the original had never left Cairo—but even so, those twenty-some pounds of pure gold and lapis lazuli made the air feel heavier.

She stood before the display case, her fingertips half an inch from the glass. This was something her mother had taught her: never touch the exhibit, but always feel its temperature.

Temperature was a form of evidence. Proof that you were still alive. Proof that you still cared. Proof that after surviving a winter like that, you could still stand here in a Chanel skirt suit, wearing precisely the right smile, like someone who had never been wounded.

Two years. She turned the number over in her mind. Long enough for certain things to settle, and certain other things to evaporate.

Long enough for a girl barely out of her teens to learn how to convert tears into something else. A curatorial assistant’s credentials, for instance. Multilingual business negotiation skills. A design brand that had yet to be made public.

She glanced down at the name tag pinned to her chest. Curatorial Assistant.

Her father needed a position where his daughter could accumulate experience; her stepmother needed a pretext to keep her stepdaughter far from the family’s core operations. So she studied art history at a private women’s college while interning at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, performing the role of a gentle, harmless, unproblematic heiress before all who watched.

She performed it so successfully that she had nearly come to believe it herself.

Her phone buzzed inside the designer evening clutch she was carrying. She was just about to retrieve it.

“Alexandra? Oh my god, it’s really you!”

She drew a deep breath—the kind she took at the starting line before a show-jumping round—and turned around.

Though she would have recognized that voice without turning.

Gloria Mordant.

Since high school, her smile had been flawless. The honeyed tan carefully cultivated on beaches. The Dior haute couture—last season’s. It seemed that even with her family’s finances in question, she still had to maintain that layer of vanity, thin as gossamer.

“I heard you’re working as a curatorial assistant.” She was walking over now, her volume calibrated to precisely the range where those nearby could hear without it seeming too loud. “That must be tough. Not like me—my family just bought a new villa in the Hamptons. We’ll be vacationing there.”

Alexandra remained composed. She recited her mother’s words silently in her mind: When you face an ugly truth, find something beautiful within it. Otherwise the ugliness will consume you.

“Congratulations.” Her voice came out soft, like silk sliding over glass. “Though I recall The Wall Street Journal reporting last month that Mordant Properties had its bond rating downgraded. I do hope that won’t affect your renovation budget.”

Gloria’s smile froze for a single beat. Alexandra noticed.

It was a skill she had acquired in art restoration coursework: observing whether the surface varnish had begun to craze, whether the underlying pigment had begun to discolor.

Gloria Mordant’s mask was a crude counterfeit, incapable of withstanding any professionally trained gaze.

And beneath that expensive layer of foundation, she detected, at the corner of the other woman’s eye, a flicker of anxiety that could not quite be concealed.

This was, without question, the most beautiful discovery of the evening.

“That report was sensationalized.” Gloria’s voice had climbed by approximately half a pitch. “These media outlets always go in for that kind of alarmism.”

“Of course.” Alexandra maintained her composed expression. “I’ve always trusted my own instincts over the press.”

Gloria stared at her for three seconds. The venom in her eyes nearly breached the levees of her breeding, but in the end she turned and walked away. Her stilettos struck the marble floor in sharp, grating stabs—a cold draft of a woman passing through.

Alexandra finally loosened her clenched hand. She glanced down. Her palm was marked with a row of small crescent-shaped indentations.

And then she looked up, and found Leonardo Cortez.

He was standing not far away. Right there. Their eyes met. He did not look away.

Now, two years later, their gazes met again between gold wrought by hands millennia dead and the crystal chandeliers of a grasping century.

His dark irises held no disturbance of surface—this was the part that most infuriated her.

No evasion. No embarrassment.

None of the reactions she had catalogued in the long rehearsal of possibility.

He merely looked at her as though those two years had been pressed into thin air, as though her materializing here were the ending he had always known would arrive.

His raven hair still had that slight wave, and he was still wearing a bespoke suit, surrounded by a cluster of people, the corner of his mouth set in a polite and distant smile.

She had studied that smile for two years, replaying the memory on countless sleepless nights, like restoring a Rembrandt that had been darkened by centuries of smoke—layer by layer, stripping back the surface varnish, trying to find the true color beneath.

He had changed, too. His shoulders were broader now. The line of his jaw was harder. Something had settled in his eyes—those deep-set eyes.

She had once spent an entire season searching for more words to describe them, and in the end had given up. They were not the kind of eyes that could easily be categorized. If she had to say: like molten obsidian, the kind that would burn anyone who touched it before it cooled.

She gave him a smile. Not a joyous smile.

Not the smile that custom demands of an old lover met again by accident.

It was the smile she had practiced before the mirror until it had worn a groove in her reflection—gentle, honeyed, and held at a perfect, calibrated remove, like a portrait of some long-dead sitter on a museum wall: the luster of oil paint immaculate, but you could never breach it to touch a breathing human being.

Her body remembered him. This was not metaphor—her pulse had already quickened on the inner face of her wrist, blood flooding toward her cheeks.

Everything she believed she could govern was, the instant she registered his presence, commandeered by some ancient system that required no assistance from the brain.

Their eyes held for perhaps a minute. Maybe less.

Time had become unreliable in her perception—a lingering effect of the post-traumatic stress response, her therapist had explained. In a state of hypervigilance, the brain over-records every detail, stretching seconds into drawn-out slow motion.

His attention was then pulled back by the people around him. That smile fixed itself on his face again, like an artifact returned to its display case.

Like a gentleman who happened to run into an old acquaintance at a charity gala, his courtesy was impeccable.

As if she were just another heiress to be politely acknowledged. As if that night two years ago were nothing more than a batch of redundant negatives, destroyed. As if he had never left a single trace upon her twenty-year-old skin.

Her fingernails bit into her palm again. Pain was an anchor. Pain was evidence. It confirmed that this moment was real, and that what she was doing—maintaining a smile, keeping her heartbeat steady—was the most flawless performance she had given in her entire life thus far.

Alexandra Wentworth, what in God’s name do you think you’re doing?

The evening continued. She fulfilled her duties flawlessly—smiling, nodding, introducing artworks to visitors—while keeping a running calculation in her head of how much time remained before she could leave.

Not until eleven o’clock exactly did she return to her apartment.

And then she smelled it.

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