“Oh. Yes.” I nod and immediately regret it when my head throbs. “We’ll talk later, then? About…details. Like what I’m telling my family. When we’re leaving. That kind of thing.”
“Sure,” he says, that faint twist at the corner of his mouth again. “See you.”
Then he disappears into his apartment.
I step back into mine, shut the door, and rest my forehead against it for a second.
Connor O’Reilly is coming with me to my father’s birthday weekend as my fake boyfriend. Specifically to piss off my ex.
That’s not a sentence I ever thought I’d be thinking at nine in the morning.
It sounds like a rom-com setup. And if rom-coms have taught me anything, this is not going to go smoothly.
I cross the room, drop onto the couch, and exhale into the cushions.
What have I gotten myself into?
CHAPTER 2. Connor
The highway stretches ahead of us, gray and flat, cutting through the early spring green creeping back into the trees. Noah hasn’t said a word in twenty-seven minutes. I know because I checked the clock at the last exit sign and then again five miles later.
It’s strange. In the two years I’ve lived across the hall, I’ve never known Noah Caldwell to be quiet for longer than thirty seconds.
He’s the type who narrates his grocery unpacking loud enough that I catch every item through the thin walls. Who swears at the coffee table when he walks into it. Who once tried to negotiate with his smoke detector after burning toast at midnight. His anxiety usually carries through the walls too—the pacing, the muttering, the way he fills every bit of silence like he can’t stand it.
Now he’s just staring out the passenger window, watching the city give way to open fields, his face set in a way I haven’t seen before. Whatever’s waiting at the end of this drive, he isn’t looking forward to it.
As we get farther from the city, traffic thins to a handful of cars and a truck hauling lumber. Noah shifts in his seat and lets out a quiet breath.
“You okay?” I ask, even though I already know the answer.
“Hm? Yeah. Fine. Great. Totally fine,” he says, all in one breath.
Right. Very convincing.
I don’t push.
The indie rock station he put on hums in the background. My eyes drift to the cup holder, where a neatly folded sheet of paper sits awkwardly between us. Noah hasn’t mentioned it. I haven’t either. But we both know what it is.
The Instruction Sheet.
It appeared under my door last night around eleven. I know because I’d just finished dinner—leftover curry that somehow was even better the second day—and was settling in for a few rounds of Dead by Daylight before bed, which is a multiplayer horror game I’m objectively bad at but continue to play anyway, even though it reliably ruins my mood. As I turned on my computer, I heard the soft rustle of paper sliding across the threshold, followed by retreating footsteps that were trying very hard to be quiet but failing completely.
I’m sure Noah has many talents, but stealth isn’t one of them.
I picked up the paper. It was a meticulously formatted document that could have passed for corporate onboarding materials.
“THE INSTRUCTION SHEET,” it read at the top, in bold fourteen-point font.
Below that, organized into neat sections with headers and bullet points, was everything I apparently needed to know in order to convincingly date Noah Caldwell for seventy-two hours.
BASIC INFORMATION
Family / Work
Parents: Daniel and Caroline Caldwell
Father: runs Caldwell Holdings (real estate development)
