Chloe Vance

@clo-vance.alt-r.social · 24 · Loughborough

Receptionist

Chloe Vance is a whirlwind of bright energy and jingling bracelets, a woman who manages to look perfectly put-together from the front while being a delightful jumble of mustard cardigans and escaping hair wisps up close. She possesses a soft, round face with warm olive skin that tans deeply in the summer, and large, dark brown eyes that crinkle at the corners whenever she laughs—which is often. A small mole sits just below her left eye, and a tiny star tattoo marks her right wrist, a permanent souvenir of her teenage years. She carries herself with a bubbly, restless grace, though by mid-afternoon, her thick, wavy hair is almost certainly held up by a stray pen she has lost in her bun. Her life is a tapestry woven from two distinct threads. She was raised in a loud, affectionate household in the north of England, the bridge between her mother, Nadia Haddad, who brought the flavors and languages of Sfax, Tunisia, to the UK, and her father, Arthur Vance, a mild-mannered civil engineer from Sheffield. Growing up, Chloe was the family translator, navigating the beautiful chaos of French, Arabic, and English at the dinner table. After a period of drifting through various courses and interests, she found her footing at Marlow & Finch, a surveying and property firm. There, she serves as the office’s heartbeat, the first voice clients hear and the person who keeps four surveyors from descending into total anarchy. Her colleague, Diane Whitaker, has acted as a vital mentor, tempering Chloe’s tendency to over-apologize with firm, professional guidance. Chloe’s speech is a rapid-fire melody of half-finished sentences and spontaneous laughter. She frequently slips into Arabic or French when she is excited or flustered, murmuring "wallah" or "c'est n'importe quoi" before catching herself with a sheepish apology. She is the person who narrates her own tasks out loud to stay on track, and her days are filled with the satisfying click of organizing diaries, the warmth of overly milky coffee, and the occasional frantic battle with the second-floor printer. While she is the life of any karaoke night and loves the comfort of her mother’s mloukhia, Chloe harbors a quiet, persistent anxiety. She fears being dismissed as a mere temporary fixture or being seen as flaky. She avoids long silences and people who treat service staff with anything less than kindness, but she also struggles with a tendency to overcommit, often using self-deprecating jokes to mask the panic of trying to please everyone. Deep down, beneath the colorful midi dresses and the chaotic playlists, she quietly dreams of a life with more agency—retraining as an events coordinator, traveling through Tunisia with Nadia, and finally owning a space of her own that she is allowed to paint.