Chapter 1 The Boy Everyone wanted

My phone lit up on the desk, and I knew who it was before I looked.

Are your parents here yet? We're taking photos by the fountain!

It was a girl from my statistics class. We had shared a study group for one semester and exchanged maybe forty sentences. She was being kind, which somehow made it worse. Before I could reply, the university group chat buzzed, then buzzed again, filling the screen with students in black gowns wrapped in the arms of mothers and fathers holding flowers.

I turned the phone face down and went back to my suitcase.

Outside my dormitory window, graduation day was at full volume. Parents called names across the courtyard. Cameras flashed in the sunlight. Inside my room there was a bare mattress, a bare desk and a single sweater I had folded three times already, because as long as my hands were busy I did not have to think about why nobody was coming.

My mother had forgotten. I had reminded her twice, and both times she had said, "Of course, darling," in the voice she used when she was already looking at something else. I had not reminded her a third time. There is only so much hope a person can spend before it starts to feel like begging.

I unfolded the sweater and folded it again.

◆

Learning not to ask for things had been the first lesson of my childhood. My father drank, and his moods were weather I could never predict. A request that made him laugh on Tuesday could make him furious on Wednesday, so I learned to read the room before I spoke and to want very little. Then my parents divorced, my mother married into the Ashford family, and I discovered that wealth had its own kind of weather. It was quieter and colder, and it never raised its voice.

So I made myself small. I said thank you for things I had not asked for. I apologized when people walked into me. By twenty-three, I was very good at it.

A knock came at the door. It was Priya from down the hall, still in her gown, her cap tilted at an angle that said everyone she knew had already hugged her.

"Elise! You're not even dressed. Is your family coming? My parents want to meet everyone."

"They have other commitments," I said, and the lie came out so smoothly it frightened me. "They'll try to catch the dinner."

"Oh." Her face softened with a pity I did not want. "Well, come find us if you like."

She left, and I stood with my forehead against the closed door. My eyes burned. I refused to let them do anything more. Crying would mean admitting that it mattered, and mattering was something I had trained myself to avoid.

I had just returned to the suitcase when the noise outside changed.

It did not stop so much as tilt. The cheerful roar of the courtyard dropped into whispers, and then a girl's voice rose above them, high and astonished.

"Oh my God. Is that Julian Ashford?"

My hands went still on the zip.

◆

I crossed to the window and kept to the side of the curtain, the way I always did. Below me the crowd had parted like water around a stone, and through the opening walked Julian.

He wore a dark suit as if it were an afterthought, his jacket open and his hair slightly disordered by the wind. He moved without hurry, like a man who had never needed permission. Students who had been laughing a moment ago stopped mid-sentence. Girls near the fountain stopped photographing each other and began photographing him.

"That's the Ashford heir," someone murmured. "He's twenty-six and already running the international division."

"Is he seeing anyone?"

I knew. He had been seeing a woman named Vanessa for four months, and he had told me about her over breakfast with a casual fondness that had stayed in my chest like a splinter.

I told myself the obvious thing. He was here for someone else, a client's daughter or an old classmate's sibling. Nobody came for me.

Then Julian stopped in the middle of the courtyard and tipped his head back. His eyes travelled along the rows of windows, one floor at a time, patient and certain. They reached the third floor. They reached mine.

They stopped.

I stepped back so fast I hit the desk. A minute later footsteps came down the corridor, unhurried, and the door opened without a knock.

"Elise."

He stood in the doorway, a little out of breath, taking in the bare mattress, the empty walls, the half-packed suitcase. His expression barely changed, but I knew him well enough to see what happened behind it.

"Why are you packing? You should be downstairs. It's your graduation."

"I'm almost done," I said, and smiled brightly. "I just wanted to get it out of the way. I'm fine."

"You're fine."

"Yes."

He looked at the lone sweater on top of the suitcase, then at me. "Where is everyone?"

"Busy. It's all right. I didn't expect much."

It was the wrong thing to say. His jaw tightened, and for a moment he looked angry on my behalf, a feeling I had never learned how to receive.

◆

Voices drifted in from the corridor. Three or four girls had gathered outside my open door, pretending to look for someone.

"That's him. I can't believe he's actually here."

"Who's the girl?"

"His stepsister. The quiet one. She is so lucky."

A pause, and then a smaller voice, sweet and cutting. "Lucky" is one word. Her mother only just married. Honestly, I don't think she belongs in a house like that."

The words struck cleanly, because I had thought about them a hundred times. What hurt more was that they could only see the surface. They saw the cars and the name. They did not see the dining room where I ate alone, or the bedroom I had spent seven years believing I was only borrowing.

Julian turned toward the corridor.

"Is there something you'd like to say?" His voice was low and perfectly polite, which made it worse. "Please. Say it to me directly."

The whispering stopped as though a hand had closed over it.

"Julian." I caught his sleeve. "Please. Don't."

"They were talking about you."

"I know. I don't want everyone looking at me."

He held my gaze, and I saw the fight in him. Then he looked at my hand on his sleeve, and the anger left his shoulders.

"Fine." He clicked my suitcase shut and lifted it as though it weighed nothing. "Come with me."

◆

He led me down a side stairwell, past the noise and the cameras, to a small walled garden behind the library that I had not known existed. Roses climbed the old brick. The ceremony was only a faint hum here.

Julian set the suitcase down. "Why do you do that?"

"Do what?"

"Disappear. The second anyone looks at you, you try to vanish."

I opened my mouth to give an easy answer and found that every one led back to the truth. Being seen by strangers was bearable. Being seen by him was not. If he looked closely enough, he would find seven years of feeling written across my face.

"I don't like attention," I said. "That's all."

He studied me, then took a small pale-blue box from his pocket, tied with a silver ribbon.

Inside, on white tissue, lay a delicate silver bracelet. From the clasp hung a tiny charm shaped like a key.

"I saw it in a shop window," he said, looking slightly past me. "It made me think of you. Don't read too much into it. It's just a graduation present."

Don't read too much into it.

I smiled. I had practiced that smile for most of my life, and it rarely failed me. "It's beautiful. Thank you."

He fastened it around my wrist himself, his fingers warm and careful. I remembered what those hands had done over the years: a plate of toast left outside my door after a nightmare, midnight notes scrawled across my textbook, a grip on my arm that pulled me back from a moving car when I was seventeen. I had kept every one of those moments like evidence, and every time they had meant less than I wanted.

"Do you like it?"

"I love it," I said, and for once it was true. "I just..."

"Good." Something shifted in his face, almost like mischief. "Because it's only the first part."

"The first part of what?"

"Of today." He picked up the suitcase again, as if the matter were settled. "My parents arranged something for you. The whole family did."

My heart gave a painful, hopeful stumble. The whole family. For me. I could only stare at him.

Julian looked back, and there was something in his expression I could not read, as though he held one end of a secret and had not yet decided how to hand it over.

"There's one more thing you should know, Elise," he said. "Tonight's celebration isn't going to be an ordinary graduation dinner."