Northern Ridge Country Club had really taken their Christmas tree game up a notch. Last year’s tree had been two stories tall; this year’s was two stories tall and decorated entirely in crystal. There were hundreds of ornaments—maybe thousands—and they all caught the sparkling lights like ice.
“I believe,” Lillian said beside me, “that we’ll skip the family portrait this year.”
“Why?” John David asked. He’d grown what seemed like about a foot since summer, and in the five minutes since we’d left the valets to park the cars, he hadn’t mentioned zombies even once. “We’re still a family, aren’t we?”
It was Lily who answered. “Of course we are.”
The Northern Ridge gingerbread was a thing of legend. Personally, I intended to drown myself in it and sneak at least three pieces out in my purse.
“Careful,” a voice said beside me. “I have it on good authority that people here really don’t like thieves.”
I turned to the last person I’d expected to see at this shindig. “Nick.”
He was wearing a tuxedo—the same one he’d worn to the lakeside fund-raiser. This time, however, he wasn’t overdressed, and he didn’t look like he was on the verge of ripping off the jacket.
“Don’t say a thing about the monkey suit,” he told me.
I called you. You didn’t answer. I left, and you told me not to come back.
Once upon a time, that would have had my guard up—almost as much as the way my heart was beating in my chest. I remembered what it was like to kiss him, what his body felt like next to mine. The feel of my hands in his hair.
The moment he’d told me that he wasn’t “dating” me for any reason other than the fact that he wanted to.
It had been four months since I’d walked away from him, and he looked exactly the same.
“I won’t say a word about the monkey suit,” I offered, “if you don’t ask me how many armed men I could disable with the excessive number of bobby pins in my hair.”
Nick managed a smile. “Seems like a fair trade.”
It took me longer than I wanted to decide what I should say next. “You never mentioned joining Northern Ridge,” I said.
“I prefer not to think about the fact that I’ve sold my soul and joined the dark side.”
“Part of Lillian’s plan to get Jessi into Symphony Ball?” I asked.
Nick nodded.
“I called you,” I said. “You didn’t answer.”
“I know.”
A few months ago, that would have thrown me into self-protection mode, if I wasn’t there already. Before that night on King’s Island, I wouldn’t have let myself want this—want him—want anything at all.
“You didn’t call me back.” I smiled. “Want to call that an oversight?”
Another guy might not have recognized that for what it was.
A normal person might have wanted an apology. A heart-to-heart. A promise that I’d changed.
Something.
But Nick just stared at me for a full three seconds, then held out his hand. “I think it’s about time you gave me a second dance.”
I gave him two before Lily pulled me away, outside to the patio overlooking the winterized pool below. At first, I thought she’d brought me out here to discuss what had happened at the cemetery, but then I saw Campbell.
A split second later, Sadie-Grace literally bowled me over with a hug.
“I love college,” she told me, scrambling to her feet and helping me up before resuming her aggressive hug campaign. “I’m majoring in dance and also Russian literature, and combined, Boone and I have only broken two bones!”
“Both Boone’s,” Campbell clarified.
“His bones are my bones,” Sadie-Grace insisted. “And vice versa. Unless that’s creepy? I’ve discovered I have a really hard time telling what’s creepy, but on the bright side, I haven’t been kidnapped or kidnapped anyone else this semester, so that’s good.”
“And you?” I asked Campbell, wondering how she’d spent the months Lily and I had been away.
“Same old, same old,” Campbell said. “Freshman year at an institution where I’m already a legend, planning world domination and plotting my revenge for the disappearing act the two of you pulled.” She turned her gaze pointedly to Lily. “Not very half-sisterly of you, was it? Not very polite, either.”
“Oh, shut up, Campbell.”
I wondered if either one of them realized that they’d acted like squabbling siblings for about as long as I’d known them.
“Just for that,” Campbell told Lily, “I’m not going to tell you what Walker’s doing or give you the present I had specially made a few months back. In fact, I won’t give any of you your presents.”
“Presents?” Sadie-Grace smiled, then turned to Lily. “Walker is going to college—in Scotland.” Sadie-Grace said Scotland like Walker might as well have been attending university on Mars. “Boone keeps asking him to mail home haggis and a kilt, but either that’s illegal or Walker just really doesn’t want to.” Waiting a beat, Sadie-Grace turned back to Campbell.
“Presents?” she said hopefully.
“I’ll give them to you,” Campbell promised coyly, “just as soon as Sawyer thanks me for getting her out of that hole.”
I had a feeling she’d be lording that over me for an eternity—and then some.
“Campbell?” I said calmly.
“Watch your language,” Lily murmured preemptively.
But all I said was: “Thank you.”
“You’re welcome.” Campbell smiled sweetly. “You’re not forgiven for ditching me—you either, Lily—but you’re welcome. Now close your eyes and hold out your hands.”
In normal circumstances, that would not have struck me as a particularly risky proposition, but between the events of our debutante year and the summer that had followed, I couldn’t rule out the possibility that, once I closed my eyes, Campbell might calmly place a stolen masterpiece or a still-beating human heart in my palm.
Hell, if history was any indication, I couldn’t testify with any level of certainty that I was talking to Campbell and not her evil—or evil-er—twin.
Sadie-Grace closed her eyes and held out her hand. Lily did the same.
“Sawyer,” Campbell prompted.
“Fine.” Eyes closed, hand held out, I waited, and then Campbell placed something in my hand. I opened my eyes and determined the present in question to be a necklace. The chain was simple and delicate, and the tiny charm on the end was . . .
“A shovel?” Lily said. “Really, Campbell?”
Campbell smirked. “They’re platinum. Custom-ordered. Honestly,” she continued as she affixed her own shovel necklace in place, “the White Gloves are proving a little mild for my taste. I deeply suspect the four of us can do better.”
“A shovel!” Sadie-Grace did the math. “Like the kind people use to dig holes!”
I could have done without the insignia Campbell had chosen, but I put the necklace on anyway.
“We’re ladies,” Campbell said as Lily and Sadie-Grace slipped their necklaces on, too. “And my mama raised me to believe that ladies play to win.”
When I’d taken Lillian’s deal more than a year earlier, it had been because I wanted to find my father, but deep down, what I’d really been looking for was family. I’d been looking for my people, for a place where I belonged. I hadn’t imagined finding it among the Debutante set.
With Lily, with Sadie-Grace, even with the devil herself, Campbell Ames.
But here I was, wearing a platinum shovel around my neck and walking back into the party with the three of them, arm in arm.
“Do you know anything about the new class of Debutantes?” Lily asked Campbell as the world around us blurred into a mix of champagne and black ties, fresh flowers and live music.
“Nothing worth repeating,” Campbell replied. “You know the girls the year below us. They’re boring. Now, if you start to look a couple of years down the line? Two of my little cousins on the Bancroft side will be coming out. I trained them in my own image.”
That was terrifying. I thought of Nick’s sister, as much an outsider to this world as I’d ever been.
“Is this the part where we say Bless their hearts?” Sadie-Grace asked.
I brought my hand to the delicate shovel charm nestled just above my collarbone. “How about”—I thought of every single thing that had happened since I became a Debutante myself—“Good luck?”