She turns around in time for me to catch her in a tight hug, and she wraps her arms around me in return, stronger than ever before. “Evie! Look at you—you’re stunning,” she says into my hair. “I’m so proud of you, sweetheart. All of this…it’s because of you and Kit, every bit of it.”
I don’t have the heart to remind her that it’s all PR. “Thanks,” I say, and I mean it. “I can’t believe you’re here. I thought you were staying home with Alexander.”
“We both always planned on surprising you tonight,” she admits, finally letting me go. She touches my hair, which is in a half-up, half-down do with strategically placed diamonds that are meant to look like a diadem. “But your father is having a bad pain day, and he didn’t want to distract you.”
“Really?” I say. “Jenkins had nothing to do with it?”
“Jenkins makes an excellent mother hen, but we all know who rules the roost,” says my mom, amused. “Alex insisted I go without him, and so here I am.”
As she touches my cheek, I notice the engagement ring she is most definitely wearing, and I sigh inwardly. At least we have our answer there. “Thank you,” I say again, catching her in another hug, even more grateful now for all the security stationed around the theater. “I’m really glad you made it.”
“We both are,” says Kit, and my mother opens her arm and pulls him into the embrace, too. It’s a sweet moment, warm and almost like we’re in our own little bubble—until I hear several clicks of a camera phone. I instantly stiffen.
“Just thought you’d want a photo,” says Thaddeus Park, who stands ten feet away, drink in one hand and phone in the other. Maisie lingers nearby, but her back is turned to us, and I spot Gia in a slinky silver dress on the other side of the sparsely populated lobby, laughing beside a tall redhead who has the bone structure of a supermodel.
“Send it to me,” requests Kit, which is much more polite than anything I can think of to say.
“Sure thing,” says Thaddeus, completely oblivious to the tension he’s caused. “Here, let me pull them up. I took a couple.”
While he shows Kit and my curious mother the results, I join my sister instead, not trusting myself to keep my cool. At first I say nothing, and I’m not even sure Maisie’s noticed me as she stares blatantly at Gia and the actress.
“You’re certainly enjoying the spotlight tonight, aren’t you?” she says at last, breaking the silence between us.
“Mm, every bit of it,” I say, sarcasm dripping from my words. “Does Thaddeus know it’s all for the cameras?”
Maisie tilts her head. “Who says it is?”
“The way you’ve been staring at Gia is a pretty good hint,” I say. “Or are you staring at the other girl? Are you upset that she doesn’t look like you?”
“What are you talking about? She’s stunning. Of course she looks like me.”
“That’s not what I—” I begin, but Maisie huffs and stalks over to Thaddeus before I can get in another word.
“Come on,” she says nastily, grabbing his elbow as he’s in the process of typing out Kit’s number. “Let’s get seats before we’re stuck next to them all night.”
As Maisie and a baffled Thaddeus head off, I rejoin Kit and my mother, who wraps her arm around my bare shoulders. “Are you going in, too?” she says.
“I—we’re not sure yet,” I say, glancing at Kit. Now that my mom is here, maybe we should join her, but I still loathe the idea of sitting through two hours of our fictionalized trauma. “Do you have a place to sit?”
She nods. “Helene and Nicholas are saving me a seat. I didn’t think you two would want to stick around and watch.”
I’m unnerved that she knows me so well, considering we barely saw each other while I was growing up. But I’m even more unsettled by the idea of my mom being buddy-buddy with my former stepmother. Helene, at least, seems to have cooled it with the menacing threats now that she knows it was Ben, not me, who was responsible for the fire at Windsor. But I still don’t trust her.
“You’re sure?” I say, and my mom nods.
“I’ll let you know how it is,” she promises. “You two stay out here and protect your peace.”
She hugs us both once more before following Maisie and Thaddeus, who end up directly behind Gia and her date in the line to get into the theater. Kit and I wait as the final warning announcement is given and Riley and Greyson are ushered inside, and finally, once we hear the rumblings from the theater begin, we seek out a small table near the corner of the bar, and a server gets us two nonalcoholic drinks and a basket of every snack they’re offering.
“Ah, the royal treatment,” I say, popping a salted peanut into my mouth. “How do you think the movie starts?”
Kit pauses, cocking his head. “From the sounds of it, with the morning of the bombing.”
I stop cold, second peanut frozen between my forefinger and thumb. “You can hear it?” I say after a beat, and sure enough, a bass-filled tremor shudders from the closed theater.
“Enough of it,” he says grimly, and suddenly I am very, very glad we chose to stay out here. But my mom…Maisie, Helene, Nicholas, even Tibby…
“Shit,” I say, barely stopping myself before I rub my eyes and ruin the hour of work that went into the makeup I’m wearing. “I can’t believe no one warned them.”
