( marc doesn't know what 'friendtergrated' means and doesn't have the opportunity to ask, not before lottie continues in spite of herself. a 'we don't even talk like that' anymore, lottie placing the emphasis in one place, marc picking it up in quite another whilst she says something about ghosting caroline, and it—

—says everything.

caroline's not here, so the only person marc can be annoyed with is lottie, even if there'd been — before the words that'd slipped from lottie's mouth — been the barest, burgeoning recognition that it was more caroline than lottie to blame. it's distant, the realisation that this must have been how marlene had felt when marc had hired chloe, when he'd made a sardonic remark about how she was 'as old as time and ugly to boot' before marlene had seen chloe.

he'd muttered something about women then, deflective and untrue, a case of avoidance from the real issue at hand.

a gesture, deliberate, towards lottie's phone. she'd been texting— )

Evidently we're operating under very different definitions of 'ghosting', Lottie. Last I heard, that doesn't involve going home and texting.

( it wasn't called ghosting when marc had been growing up. it hadn't even been called ghosting when marc had been an adult, when he'd faked his own death and fucked off to mexico, denying any relation to his old lives as marc spector and steven grant. had opted to force jake to the front, to deal with his mess, and even when jake hadn't exactly agreed, marc had pretended to be him anyway.

marc knows how to ghost in the cruellest of ways. and he knows, too, that lottie's actions are not it. )