“I wanted to thank Mr. Button for helping me out in Italy. I had a really tough time the last couple of months and he stepped in with this complicated situation I was dealing with at the ballet company. He even helped me get promoted to principal dancer,” Evie said, smiling now with her mouth, but the rest of her features remained neutral.
“That’s amazing! Congratulations,” Romeo said, sounding way more excited than Evie had. He’d assumed a promotion would be a good thing, but maybe it just meant more hard work for her.
“Thanks,” she said in a weirdly depleted tone. “Anyway, I know your dad is really busy, so I should probably take the chance now to greet him,” she finished, her gaze drifting back out to the crowd where Romeo’s father stood alone, his face stretched into an aggressively radiant smile as he spoke to an important-looking man in a brown suit while Octavius played on.
“You’re probably right. He’s a hard man to pin down. I live in the same house as the guy and I hardly see him outside of breakfast,” Romeo said with his own smile.
Evie smiled back. “I’d better hurry along, then, before I lose my chance,” she said.
Romeo nodded. “Good idea.”
Evie opened up her purse and pulled out an older model of a very battered-looking phone, presenting it to him.
“Here, I forgot to ask for your number earlier. Ignore the state of my phone, it’s ancient, I know,” she said.
Romeo blinked down at the device as though it might go off and explode in his face.
“I should probably give you mine too, hold on—I have an Italian phone number right now, though I never memorized it.” She pulled out a little red notebook from what appeared to a massive pocket in her dress and quickly opened it up to a notes page titledITALIAN MOBILEwith a series of foreign digits scribbled out in cursive. “There, copy that down.”
Romeo did not waste another moment; he quickly brought his phone out and began typing the foreign digits in.
Afterward, he entered his own number into her phone, which was somewhat of a challenge given that the keypad was very small.
“Perfect,” Evie said. “If I don’t see you again tonight, I’ll text you. We can try to hang out while I’m still in the city?”
There was a fluttering sensation in Romeo’s chest. “Uh, yeah, that sounds, good—really good.”
“Good.Well, I’ll see you later then, Captain,” she said with a wink and a salute. Then she swiftly jumped off from the platform they were on before Romeo could say anything. Not that he was in any state to speak, anyway; Evie seemed to have sent his nervous system into shock. He wasn’t sure how many moments passed before his pulse returned to normal.
A sudden round of applause surged into the atmosphere of the ship, and Romeo glanced at the stage to find Octavius staggering off, finished with his piece and looking worn out, sickly, and sunken eyed. Thankfully, Henry was there, as he always was, to catch Octavius before he could fall.
A flash of something else caught Romeo’s attention. Above the throng of people, he could see his father’s dark-blond hair sticking out as he disappeared through the crowd, seemingly headed for one of the stairs leading to the lower deck of the yacht.
And edging closely behind, he could see slivers of silver disappearing too through the crowd, like the pluming of wirygraysmoke.
THE NEXT DAY
7:37A.M.—THE BUTTON MANOR
Octavius Button woke to the sound of screaming.
Or at least that’s what it sounded like to him at first, anyway. With his colossal hangover, even a whisper could sound like thunder.
He buried his head inside the cove of his pillow, trying to block out the noise, but still the sound persisted, growing louder and more unpleasant. A sharp, sustained, tuneless string of notes, like the hungry bleating of a Welsh mountain goat.
After some thorough investigation—namely, lifting his head, squinting his eyes open, and surveying the space around him—Octavius realized that the screaming was not in fact screaming at all, but was instead the distant sound of the west wing bell tolling, calling them all down from their various corners of the Manor for breakfast. The bell was a sound he was not used to hearing anymore.
Octavius winced in pain when he opened his eyes wider now and the bright rays of the morning sunlight streamed into his room and assaulted his irises.
He sat up, holding his pounding head in his hands. Who on earth let him drink that much last night?
But in the midst of trying to will his hangover away, Octavius heard the bleating noise grow closer.
“I’m coming, I’m coming!” he yelled, as if he could be heard by anyone but himself in his mostly soundproofed room. He pushed off from his bed and slipped into his pajama bottoms, a nightshirt, and fuzzy slippers before finally exiting his room.
As expected, standing right by his door was one of the maids, holding up two bells and swinging them into the air like a woman possessed. Octavius had forgotten how much he hated mornings in the Manor.
The maid finally stopped when she saw the discontented face of Octavius watching her disdainfully from the doorway. He must have slept through the general morning bell, so she was probably sent here to personally torment him.
