Catherine Vale. The woman who was everything she wasn’t. Diamond of an elite UR family, family friend to the Kings, and—by every available metric—the perfect match for Gage.
Her strengths: looking like a fashion editorial in motion, complimenting people into therapy, and reducing Bea from a respectable five-foot-five to approximately the size of Tom Thumb. Of course she’d sat across from him, glass of wine in hand, probably in something black and backless.
Bea had chosen to go home. Catherine had stayed. Where he was.
It was ridiculous, really, but it hadn’t quite occurred to her that Gage might be fielding the same kind of attention she’d been trying to avoid.
“Classic guest list,” she said, since she had to saysomething.
“Mm.”
“What about New Year’s?” she changed the subject, since the last thing she wanted to hear more about was a dinner where Catherine had been. “You going to the Meridian?”
The Meridian was the residence of the First Minister, the leader of the UR, and the official Hall of State. It looked almost otherworldly, rising from the earth like a commandment—domed, encircled in glass, as if the world had been built around it rather than before it.
She’d never been inside, but she knew Gage had. Families like the Kings, part of the billionaire class whose empires underpinned the UR’s economic strength, were considered a matter of national interest. Politicians didn’t just know them. They relied on them.
“Nah,” he replied. “Probably just Nate and a few others.”
“At yours?”
“Or Nate’s.”
She nodded.
“You?” he asked. “New Year’s?”
“I’ll do something with Claire,” she said. “A party downtown. Just someone’s apartment.”
“Who’s going to be there?” Gage asked.
“Some people from U of T,” she said. “A few from high school.”
He nodded, but didn’t say anything.
“Nothing fancy by UR standards. Food, drinks, music you wouldn’t like.”
He waited in that calm way of his that always made her say more than she meant to.
I’m walking straight into this one.
“There’s…this one guy,” she murmured. “Logan. He’s messaged a bit. Called once.”
A pause. “When?”
“The day after I got back.”
“And he doesn’t know about me.”
He couldn’t have known that. And yet, somehow, he did.
“Not exactly,” Bea hedged.
“Why not?”
“I haven’t really told anyone. Just Claire. My parents.”
Because she didn’t know how to explain it. Because it still felt too big, too strange, too far from the girl everyone thought she was. Beatriz Cruz from Toronto, dating Gage King, billionaire from Northgate.
