And then my heart broke, too.
Silence, and then footsteps. Dean and Harper slowly came around the corner.
“Hey, guys,” Dean said slowly. “Everything cool?”
“I need to go home,” I managed.
“I’ll take you.” Harper offered me the puffy sleeve of her arm—she was dressed as a suffragette—and I took it. Xander gave me a final pained glance, and then I couldn’t see through my tears.
Harper hustled me through the crowd, so I didn’t have to see or talk to anybody. In her car, an old Prius, I slumped in the passenger seat and cried.
“Oh, babe,” Harper said, pulling me in for a hug. “Is now a bad time to say I knew it all along?”
“What did you know?”
“You and Xander—”
“There is no me and Xander.” I looked up at her through my tears. “Please, Harper. Take me home.”
***
Harper dropped me off, and I trudged up the drive to the house. It was late, after eleven, and I headed straight through the quiet dark toward my room. I was almost at the stairs when my father’s voice—soft and calm—made me freeze.
“Emery. Come here a moment.”
The door to Dad’s study was open, and a faint glow of yellow light reached the hall. I stepped inside. He had a fire going—the flames burning behind him and casting him in shadow. The small green Tiffany lamp on his desk cast more shadows against his sharp nose and gleamed over his balding head, which was bent over some papers.
“Sit.”
I obeyed, sinking into the seat across from him, my hands folded in the lap of my dress, every muscle in my body tense, my heart still aching from the conversation with Xander. After several long moments, my father set his pen down and regarded me.
“Did you win?”
I blinked. “Win…?”
“The costume contest. Tucker seemed quite confident you two would win Best Couple.”
“Oh. Uh, no. We didn’t win.”
My heart was pounding now under my dad’s scrutiny, as if he knew. As if he could see it on my face that Ihadwon, just not with his golden boy. I’d won Best Couple with the boy who didn’t want me…
“That’s a shame,” Dad said. “You’re home early. I’d have thought you and Tucker would have stayed later at the party.”
“I…I’m not feeling well.”
Dad nodded. “We never talked after that Xander fellow left the other day.”
My hands made fists in my lap. “He didn’tleave,Daddy,” I said slowly, feeling like I was poking a rattlesnake but was unable to help myself. “You kicked him out.”
“I know what I saw, Emery,” Dad said. “And I didn’t like it.”
He let the words hang in the air between us, thick with disapprovaland unspoken warning. Just when I thought I’d shatter with the tension, he leaned back in his chair.
“The Narragansett Bay Regatta is coming up. The same night as the election, as it happens. Until that time, we need to keep a united front with the Hills. You’ll attend the election watch party with Tucker, of course.”
“I don’t want to be with Tucker anymore,” I said, hardly a whisper. “I broke up with him—”
My father got up from his chair and came around desktop my side, speaking as if he hadn’t heard me. Or chose not to.
