All Of Her

Chapter 1: The Match

The notification arrived at 11:47 PM on a Tuesday, which Perry Steanson would later consider the most dangerous moment of his life, though at the time it felt like nothing more than a small mercy.

He was sitting on the floor of his apartment—their apartment, technically, for another six days until the lease transfer finalized and it became solely his—eating pad thai from a container balanced on his knee. The television was on but muted. He'd been watching a nature documentary about octopuses, creatures that could reshape their entire bodies to mimic other animals, and he'd turned the sound off because the narrator's calm British voice made him feel like he was being gently euthanized.

His phone buzzed against the hardwood.

*You have a new match: Bette K.*

He almost didn't open it. Three weeks on the app had produced a string of conversations that died like campfires in rain—a few bright exchanges, then smoke, then nothing. He was forty-one years old, recently divorced, and increasingly convinced that the version of himself capable of charming a stranger had been packed into one of the boxes his ex-wife, Trish, had shipped to her sister's place in Bend.

But he opened it.

Bette K.'s profile photo showed a woman with dark auburn hair caught mid-laugh, her head thrown back slightly, one hand raised as if she'd just made a point she found hilarious. Her bio read: *I cook elaborate meals for one and pretend I'm on a cooking show. Looking for a studio audience.*

Perry smiled. It was a real smile, the kind that used muscles in his face that had gone slack over the past four months. He typed a message before he could talk himself out of it.

*I should warn you—I'm a terrible audience. I clap at the wrong times and I once booed a soufflé.*

The reply came in under a minute.

*A soufflé? What did it ever do to you?*

*It fell.*

*They ALL fall, Perry. That's what makes them brave.*

He laughed out loud in his empty apartment, and the sound startled him.

They messaged for two hours that first night. She was thirty-eight, worked in medical device sales, and had moved to Portland from the Bay Area three years ago. She liked hiking but hated the word "hiking"—she preferred "aggressive walking." She'd read every novel by Patricia Highsmith and could argue convincingly that Tom Ripley was the most honest character in American fiction. She asked Perry questions about his work as a software engineer with what seemed like genuine curiosity, which was unusual. Most people's eyes—or, in this case, attention—glazed over when he mentioned database architecture.

They met four days later at a Vietnamese restaurant on Division Street. Perry arrived twelve minutes early and ordered a beer he didn't want so he'd have something to do with his hands. When Bette walked in, he recognized her immediately from her photos but was still somehow unprepared. She was taller than he'd expected, with sharp cheekbones and green eyes that seemed to be permanently amused by something. She wore a leather jacket over a simple black dress, and she moved through the restaurant with the easy confidence of someone who'd never once worried about being in the wrong place.

"Perry," she said, and the way she said his name—like she'd been saying it for years, like it was comfortable in her mouth—made something loosen in his chest.

"Bette."

She slid into the booth across from him and immediately stole a sip of his beer. "Sorry. Needed that. Parking in this neighborhood is an act of war."

"I walked."

"Of course you did. You live eight blocks away. You told me. I remember everything you've told me, which is either flattering or creepy depending on your perspective."

"I'll go with flattering."

"Smart man."

Dinner lasted three hours. She ordered for both of them—"Trust me, the bún bò Huế here will change your theology"—and she was right. She told him about growing up in Northern California, about her mother who'd been "a character, to put it generously," about her two sisters whom she described as her best friends and her worst enemies in the same breath. She asked about his divorce with a directness that should have been uncomfortable but wasn't.

"What happened?" she said, chin propped on her hand.

"The short version? We wanted different things."

"What's the long version?"

Perry considered this. "The long version is that we wanted different things, but we spent nine years pretending we didn't, and by the time we admitted it, we'd become strangers who happened to share a bathroom."

Bette nodded slowly. "That's not a short version and a long version. That's the same version with more words."

"Yeah," Perry said. "I guess it is."

"I like that about you. You're not hiding some secret reservoir of bitterness. You're just... done."

"Is that a good thing?"

"It's a clean thing. Clean is underrated."

She kissed him on the sidewalk afterward, quick and certain, and then stepped back and said, "I'll call you tomorrow at lunch. Pick up." She walked away before he could respond, her heels clicking on the wet concrete, and Perry stood there for a full minute in the Portland mist, feeling like a man who'd just been handed a second chance he hadn't known he'd been waiting for.

She did call the next day. At 12:15, right when she said she would.

That precision, that reliability—it was part of what drew him in. After the slow erosion of his marriage, where promises became suggestions and plans dissolved like sugar in rain, Bette's consistency felt like bedrock. She said she'd be somewhere, she was there. She said she'd call, she called.

They fell into each other with a velocity that should have frightened him. Second date: a rainy Saturday at Powell's, where she pulled obscure thrillers off shelves and read him the first paragraphs, rating each one on a scale she called "the Highsmith Index." Third date: cooking together at her place—a small apartment in the Pearl District that was immaculately organized, every spice alphabetized, every surface gleaming. Fourth date: they didn't leave his apartment for thirty-six hours.

Perry's friend Loretta Jackson called on a Sunday morning in late October, three weeks into things.

"So," Loretta said. "You're alive."

"Very much so."

"I've texted you eleven times."

"I know. I'm sorry. I've been—"

"Busy. Yes. I gathered." A pause. "Tell me about her."

Perry tried. He told Loretta about Bette's laugh, about the way she argued about books, about the cooking, about how she made him feel like the fog of his divorce had lifted and revealed a landscape he'd forgotten existed.

Loretta listened. She was good at that. They'd been friends since college—twenty years of the kind of friendship that survived distance, marriages, and the occasional three-month silence. Loretta worked as a paralegal at a firm downtown, and she had the professional skeptic's gift for listening to a story and hearing the parts that were missing.

"She sounds great," Loretta said carefully.

"But?"

"No but. She sounds great. I want to meet her."

"You will. Soon."

"Perry."

"What?"

"Just... be careful. You're still raw. And people who seem perfect usually aren't. That's not cynicism, that's statistics."

He promised he'd be careful. He wasn't.

By December, Bette had a key to his apartment. By January, half her closet had migrated to his bedroom. By Valentine's Day, she'd moved in officially, and Perry's one-bedroom on Hawthorne had transformed from the somber quarters of a man reassembling his life into something warm and inhabited and alive.

She cooked dinners that made him groan. She reorganized his kitchen with an efficiency that bordered on surgical. She curled against him on the couch and asked about his day with an attentiveness that made him feel, for the first time in years, genuinely seen.

But.

There was a but, and it started small—so small that Perry filed it under the vast category of things that didn't matter.

The first inconsistency: perfume.

Bette wore a scent he loved, something warm and slightly sweet, like vanilla and cedar. He'd complimented it once, early on, and she'd told him it was called Santal 33, that she'd worn it for years. But some mornings—not often, maybe once or twice a month—she'd come out of the bedroom smelling different. Sharper. Something floral and cold, like lilies in a hospital corridor.

"New perfume?" he asked one Saturday.

She looked at him blankly. "What? No. Same as always."

"It smells different today."

She lifted her wrist to her nose. "Does it? I don't smell anything different." She shrugged. "Maybe it reacts differently depending on the weather. Humidity or something."

Perry accepted this. Perfume was not his area of expertise.

The second inconsistency: the restaurant.

They'd gone to a Thai place on Alberta Street for Bette's birthday in March—a small, excellent spot with hand-painted murals on the walls and a chef who came out to personally recommend dishes. They'd had a memorable meal. Two weeks later, Perry suggested going back.

"Sure," Bette said. "Where is it?"

"Alberta. We went for your birthday."

She stared at him. Then she laughed. "Oh, right. Sorry. I was thinking of somewhere else. Of course. That place was great."

But when they arrived, she'd looked around the restaurant like she was seeing it for the first time. She'd studied the menu as if she hadn't ordered from it fourteen days earlier. She'd asked the server for recommendations.

Perry told himself she'd been distracted. She'd been working long hours. Medical device sales, she said, involved a lot of travel and a lot of stress. People forgot things when they were stressed.

The third inconsistency: shellfish.

Early in their relationship, Bette had told him she was allergic to shellfish. He'd made a mental note—he was a software engineer; mental notes were his native language. He'd been careful at restaurants, careful when cooking. Then one evening in April, they ordered takeout from a new seafood place, and Bette casually ordered shrimp pad thai.

"Wait," Perry said. "Shrimp?"

"Mm-hmm."

"You're allergic to shellfish."

Bette paused. Something flickered across her face—not confusion exactly, but something like recalibration. "Oh," she said. "Right. I used to be. I got retested last year. Turns out it was a sensitivity, not a true allergy. I keep forgetting to mention it."

"You got retested?"

"Yeah. My doctor suggested it. Apparently childhood allergies can resolve." She smiled. "Lucky me. I love shrimp."

Perry said nothing more about it. But later that night, lying in bed while Bette slept beside him, he stared at the ceiling and felt the first real tendril of unease curl through his stomach.

People forgot restaurants. Perfume chemistry was complicated. Allergies could change.

But all of it together? It was starting to feel like a pattern—not of forgetfulness, but of disconnection. As if the woman lying next to him occasionally lost the thread of her own life.

He mentioned it to Loretta over coffee the next week. They met at their usual spot, a café near her office that served espresso strong enough to strip paint.

"She forgot the restaurant?" Loretta said.

"More like she didn't recognize it."

"And the allergy thing."

"Yeah."

Loretta wrapped both hands around her mug. She had a face that could go from warm to forensic in a heartbeat, and right now it was somewhere in between.

"Perry, I need to say something, and I need you to hear it as your friend and not as someone who's trying to ruin your happiness."

"That's a hell of a preamble."

"The few times I've been around Bette—she's different."

"Different how?"

"Different different. Not mood-swing different. Not good-day-bad-day different. Like..." Loretta searched for the words. "Like she's a different person. The Bette I met at your birthday dinner was funny and flirty and couldn't stop touching you. The Bette I ran into at the grocery store last week was quiet, almost shy. She organized your cart by food group, Perry. She alphabetized your spice rack. And she looked at you like—" Loretta stopped.

"Like what?"

"Like she loved you. But not the way the other Bette loves you. A different kind of love. Softer. Almost sad."

Perry felt something cold move through him. "She has moods. Everyone has moods."

"These aren't moods. I'm telling you. I've been a paralegal for fifteen years. I've watched people on the stand. I know when someone is playing a role. And I'm telling you—sometimes Bette is playing a role, and sometimes she's not, and the person who's not playing a role is a completely different woman."

Perry wanted to argue. He wanted to tell Loretta she was being dramatic, that she'd never fully warmed to Bette, that this was just the protective skepticism of a friend who'd watched him go through a brutal divorce.

But he couldn't say any of that, because somewhere in the architecture of his mind—the part that organized data, that recognized patterns, that debugged systems by identifying the variable that didn't belong—he knew Loretta was right.

Something about Bette didn't compile.