Chapter 3

Mark' s frantic energy dissolved into a furious argument with the empty air. He yelled at the car, kicking the front tire with a pathetic thud that did nothing but hurt his own foot. He limped around, clutching it, his face a mask of impotent rage. This was the man Chloe would one day idolize as her genetically superior father. What a joke.

After a few minutes, the passenger door of the broken-down car creaked open. A woman emerged, wrapped in a ridiculously thin but fashionable coat. Isabella. So she wasn't at a party after all, she was waiting in the car, expecting to drive away unburdened, leaving her child with me.

Her face, even from a distance, was contorted with fury. She marched right up to Mark and started shouting. I couldn't hear the words, but her body language was clear. She pointed at the baby in the car, then at him, then at my apartment building. She was blaming him for the failure of their plan.

Mark shouted back, pointing at the spot on the ground where he' d thrown his phone. He was blaming her for... what? Not being rich enough yet to solve this? Not having a backup plan? Their perfect, united front, so strong when they were ganging up on me in my past life, was already crumbling under the slightest pressure.

Isabella responded not with a solution, but with tears. She slumped against the car, her shoulders shaking, a picture of delicate fragility. It was a performance I knew all too well. In my past life, Chloe had perfected the same act. Whenever she was caught doing something wrong, whenever she was held accountable, she would cry. Not tears of remorse, but tears of manipulation, designed to make you feel guilty, to make you back down.

I remembered one time, Chloe had stolen money from my purse to buy a designer handbag she knew I wouldn't approve of. When I confronted her, she didn't apologize. She burst into tears, wailing about how all her friends had nice things and how I was so unfair, how I didn't understand the social pressures she was under. She made it my fault. And like a fool, I had comforted her. I had apologized.

Watching Isabella now, it was like seeing the ghost of Chloe' s future manipulations. The apple didn't fall far from the tree. The genes she was so proud of were not for talent or intelligence, but for deceit and emotional blackmail.

Mark, for his part, seemed to be momentarily taken in by the performance. He stopped yelling and tried to comfort her. But then Chloe started crying again from inside the car, a loud, insistent wail that cut through their drama. The reality of the situation intruded once more.

The sight of their bickering, their utter uselessness, filled me with a cold, clear sense of vindication. This is who they were. Selfish, short-sighted people who created problems and expected others to fix them. As they stood there, arguing and crying in the snow next to a dead car and a neglected baby, I felt no pity. Only a grim, satisfying sense of justice. They were finally stewing in the mess they had made, and it was a beautiful sight to behold. Their internal conflict was just beginning, and it was already causing their carefully laid plans to implode. The crisis wasn't just out of control, it was a fire they were feeding with their own incompetence.