Running through the gardens at a ball with a wet dress and even wetter cheeks is not a good look.
But Father finds an answer that softens my bolted shoulders. “It is too close to the New Year. She must be home for the ritual.”
Father draws away from Harold, who, with a scathing glare at me—that raises my brows—turns on the group and stalks to his Royce.
Amelia pauses to rest a hand on my shoulder, her quiet goodbye, before she joins her husband.
Dray follows.
And I’m left to the mercy of my family.
None of them appear to be speaking to me.
Not Grandmother as she stalks to her own car.
Not Mother who doesn’t spare me even a glance before she’s moving for the door Mr Younge holds open.
Father takes the door on the other side, Oliver his shadow—until it’s just me and my steps that drag over the stained concrete floor.
The potent stench of the airport chases me into the car, and even as I slip into my usual seat, beside Oliver and across from Mother, the burn of it down my throat is stirring a tinge of nausea in my gut.
The car door closes on us—traps me with avoidant gazes, gleaming smartphone screens, and a silence thicker than a slab of butter rammed down my throat.
The Royce purrs to life, Mr Younge in the passenger seat beside the driver, separated from us by a tinted privacy screen.
Finally, I’m alone with my family.
The whole agonising morning at Versailles—when I ignored the breakfast served in the hall, snubbed the knock at the door that came with no name, so I imagine it was either Serena or Landon (who is now apparently myfriend), and when, starving with a bubbling acidic gut, I dragged myself to the cars out front, and was joined by Oliver and Dray for the silent journey to the airport—I waited for this very moment.
But now that it’s come, and I am sunken into the comfy seat of the Royce, the airport moving by through the tinted window, and all three phones are out, screens glowing, I choke.
The anger they hold onto, my parents especially, is for how I was seen at the ball. In a shambles.
Oliver would have told them all about the sedative he drugged me with, and the why.
Because I know.
I am to marry Dray Sinclair.
And yet, their anger is aimed atme.
Courtney has pestered me for years to tell my parents, tell them what Dray does to me, has done, will continue to do for the rest of my life if they allow this marriage.
How can I expect them to understand… if I don’t tell them the truth?
But that’s no easy thing.
The resistance in me presses the toes of my shoes into the floor of the car; it digs my fingernails into the curve of the leather seat; it grits my teeth together in an awful, painful way, because that is still less agonising than facing this—
The moment I tell my parents who Dray really is. The moment I speak a truth I am not supposed to voice.
I just don’t know how they are going to take it.
I clear my throat, but the sound is weak, like a coarse breath, quick to stop, as though I swallowed back a light tickle.
My mouth sucks inwards and, for a beat, I bite down on my lips before releasing them. They are slow to plump again, and it’s only now I realise I haven’t drunk much water in a while.
Not really a concern right now.
