I shake my head and drink my hot rum, making a sincere effort not to look at Ransom, because whenever I think about making a family, I think of him.
How is it possible that the year we spent together meant so much to me and yet nothing to him?
“You know, your mother mentioned you were at Stanford, Ember,” Calypso muses. “Did you and Ransom meet up while you were there?”
The way she asks the question makes me uncomfortable. I wonder if maybe Ransom told her about us, and that feels like a betrayal because we’d decided we’d tell no one. What would the point be? It would just unsettle his family and mine.
Ransom doesn’t wait for me to answer. “I’m at the hospital, and Ember hid in a lab, Cali, it’s not like we were even in the same building.”
Hid in a lab.
“But you’re all friends,” Calypso protests.
“Well…I’m closer in age to Aksel and Freja,” he adds, dripping some more acid onto my wounds.
“Ransom likes me best amongst the three of us,” Freja chirps. “Right, Ransom?”
“Absolutely.”
I feel his gaze upon me, but I don’t dare raise my eyes, which are threatening to fill with tears. If that happens, he’ll know that I’m still in love with him, and I’ll be humiliated.
Freja’s phone beeps, and she groans after reading the message. “Mama wants to remind everyone that we’re todress upfor Christmas Eve dinner. She wants to do some murder mystery theater nonsense.”
“Is this going to be as bad as the time she did the musical night?” Ransom asks laconically. “I don’t think I’m in the mood for an opera singer to teach me how tobleat like a lamb”—he says that in a German accent—“while I’m trying to eat one.”
“Worse!” Aksel downs his drink in one go. “She hired someone to run the show.”
“Wanna bet whoever it is shows up in a Hercule Poirot costume and says, ‘Ooh, my little gray cells’?” Freja attempts a poor imitation of the Belgian detective.
While they fill Calypso in on how Mama always goes overboard with her ideas of making Christmas Eve dinnerfunfor the family, Ransom leans forward. “You okay?”
I look up at him, now in better control of my emotions. “Of course.”
“She doesn’t know…or rather, I never told her,” he assures me, his tone low. For my ears only.
I tip my chin in acknowledgment. “Okay.”
“But…I think she guesses.”
I draw in a deep breath. “Why would she do that?”
“Because I can’t stop looking at you.”
CHAPTER 6
Ransom
“Because I can’t stop looking at you.”
It was entirely the wrong thing to say. Her eyes light up for a moment, a nanosecond, before despair fills them.
I’m a fucking idiot!
After lunch, we head to Marché de Noël.
Chamonix is wrapped in soft blue twilight, the last streaks of daylight fading behind Mont Blanc. Strings of golden lights crisscross above the cobbled streets like constellations, and the air smells like cinnamon, pine, mulled wine, and roasted chestnuts.
Snow drifts down in slow, steady flakes, clinging to the tips of scarves and eyelashes, the kind that makes you tilt your face up and just breathe it in.
