“About Adam.” My voice shakes. I can’t even form proper sentences, I’m so seething. “And the bar.”
Her brows knit. “I’m not quite sure what you mean. You don’t look well, let’s get you a tonic.” She steps forward to reach for my arm.
“Don’t touch me.” The words scrape out of my throat. “I know you and your sorority friends concocted the story.”
She opens her mouth, but I cut her off. “Don’t try to deny it.”
Something in her expression shifts, calculating now. She straightens and crosses her arms. “It was for your own good.”
A short, broken laugh tumbles out. “What?”
“He wasn’t right for you!” Her tone sharpens. “Have you not been listening to anything I’ve been telling you, all these years? You couldn’t be slumming it with a nobody.”
“It was neveryourcall to make!” My hands shake at my sides. “I thought you were my friend.”
“I am,” Blanca says quickly. “That’s why I had to protect you. You were blind.”
I turn on my heel, pacing the polished floor, my footsteps echoing too loudly in the large space. I want to grab one of the expensive antique vases and throw it at her.
“When you told me about Will, I thought everything was going to be fine. And then I’d find my own husband, and we’d both have the life we always dreamed of.”
Before I left London, Will told me he loved me. His voice was so sure when he said it, like he had no doubts about us. And I stood there, frozen. I didn’t want to lie to him and lead him on when I wasn’t even close to feeling the same way.
Will was fun. No pressure or expectations. At least until he dropped them all at my feet and I couldn’t even fathom the possibility. My soul didn’t call back to him. I couldn’t picture myself building a life with him.
“You dreamed of.” I point my finger in her direction, taking a few steps toward her, and she retreats. “The lifeyoudreamed of!”
I never wanted to have a marriage like a merger. I wanted to be with someone who saw me as I was. Ambitious. Perhaps a bit of a control freak. And still loved me fiercely. Someone like…Adam.
Blanca gasps, tears gathering fast, lips trembling.
“Was that your plan?” I level her with a razor-thin look. “When you both came to visit me? Tohelp?” my voice raises, “Play matchmaker for a man I. Don’t. Want!”
“I didn’t like how that pushy arriviste came back into your life,” she snaps, still having the audacity to try to explain herself.
“His name is Adam!” I yell, my skin hot. “God, I can’t believe you did that to me.” My chest caves in on itself, leaving nothing but a cold, aching void where my trust in her used to be. “You destroyed the best thing that’s ever happened to me.”
And I fucking let her.
Chapter Twenty-Six
ADAM
The moment the seatbelt sign turns off with a ping, the flight attendants are on their feet, slipping into the aisle.
On the side divan, Eliza is perched on Carter’s lap, showing him pictures on her phone and chattering away while my best friend wears the dopiest grin I’ve ever seen.
“Sometimes I feel I’m encroaching on their perpetual honeymoon. And they’re not even married yet,” I whisper to Jackie.
In a move that surprised me, she dropped into the leather recliner beside me as soon as she stepped onto the plane, even though the ones facing us stayed empty.
She hasn’t said much, but her knees bounced faster with each mile we speared through the clouds. And now my joke falls flat, while she wrings her hands in her lap.
I’ve tried to act like nothing was wrong after our last conversation, but I wonder if I said too much. I couldn’t help the bitterness lining my insides. It’s been sitting in me for years, the bitter knowledge that she wanted to keep me hidden. That I wasn’t enough to stand beside her in the open. But the truth was even more repugnant. She believed the worst of me.
I couldn’t even bear to pretend my way back into the fragile ceasefire we’d been balancing this past month.
Out of the blue, Jackie goes still, and in a voice I barely recognize, she says:
