Chapter 2 2

WREN’S POV

I sat frozen in my window seat, staring at the little date stamp in the corner of the seatback screen until Zara actually reached over and started waving her hand in front of my face.

"Hello. Earth to Wren. You've gone a very concerning color."

"I'm fine," I managed, though my voice came out strange, thin, still half tangled up in a closet that didn't exist, a version of Kai who'd apparently been living rent-free somewhere in my subconscious for two entire years without my permission.

"You do not look fine. You look like you've seen a ghost."

"Just a weird dream." Or a flashback?

Zara Ashworth-Vane has been my best friend for nine years, ever since my mother took the job cooking for her family and I trailed in behind her clutching a stuffed rabbit and blinking up at a house the size of a small country. 

She is, and I mean this with the fondest possible exasperation, the single most effortlessly beautiful person I have ever known in real life, dark hair that always looks deliberately tousled even when she's rolled out of bed forty seconds earlier, the kind of easy, unbothered confidence that money buys you when nobody's ever once made you feel small in a room. 

She is also, crucially, the only Ashworth-Vane who has never treated me like the help's daughter, not once, not in nine years, and I would genuinely walk into traffic for her without hesitation.

"You said that on the coach too."

"Did I?" I hadn't remembered saying it at all, and the fact that apparently this wasn't the first time in twenty-four hours I'd woken up shaken and lying about why made my stomach twist uncomfortably. "It's exam brain. We just finished the worst week of our entire academic lives. My subconscious is allowed to be unhinged about it."

Zara studied me a moment longer, unconvinced but mercifully willing to let it go, and I turned back to the window, watching the clouds break apart beneath us as we began our descent into JFK, trying very hard not to think about chilled champagne and a mouth that had felt entirely too real for something that had happened, if it had happened at all, exactly two years ago at his mother's spring garden party.

His mother. Cordelia Ashworth-Vane, who I have known my entire adolescent life as a distant, glacial presence gliding through rooms I was only ever allowed to clean, never sit in. She is the true head of that family, whatever the papers say about her husband's business empire, and in nine years I have never once seen her offer either of her sons a single word of unprompted warmth. I used to think that explained things about Kai and Rhys. Lately I've started to suspect it explains rather more than I want it to.

It hadn't happened, the dream. I was fairly confident it hadn't happened. 

I would have remembered something like that, surely, would have carried it around like a live grenade for two years instead of just now, apparently, dreaming it into existence with startling, humiliating clarity.

Wouldn't I.

"Can we please talk about literally anything else," I pressed, mostly to drown out my own spiraling thoughts. "How are you feeling about the internship results?"

"Do not," Zara groaned, visibly relieved by the subject change, "get me started. I have refreshed that portal so many times this week I'm fairly certain the university's IT department has flagged my account for suspicious activity."

Zara wants to model professionally, has wanted it since she was fourteen and got scouted at a family friend's charity gala, though her mother still refers to it, when she refers to it at all, as "the hobby," as though it's something Zara will grow out of like a taste for expensive trainers. Zara has never once let that stop her. It's one of about four thousand reasons I love her.

"When do you find out?"

"Officially, two weeks. Unofficially, I've already convinced myself I didn't get it, spiraled about it for four consecutive nights, and then remembered that catastrophizing before I have actual information is, and I quote my own therapist here, an unproductive use of my anxiety."

"Your therapist sounds like a genius."

"She's alright. Mostly I just like having someone whose entire job is legally required to listen to me complain about my family for fifty minutes."

I laughed, grateful for the easy, familiar rhythm of this, of Zara, of anything that wasn't the phantom memory of champagne-slick hands and a version of Kai who apologized instead of insulted. The plane bumped gently through a patch of turbulence and I gripped the armrest on reflex, and Zara, without looking up from her phone, reached over and patted my hand exactly the way she'd been doing since we were fourteen and I'd had a minor meltdown on a school trip flight to Rome.

"We're going to land in one piece," she promised. "We're going to see Iris Starr live in concert, we are going to have the best week of our entire lives, and my idiot brother is not going to be anywhere near us, so you can stop doing whatever it is your face is currently doing."

"Which brother," I asked, mostly to be difficult, because there are, after all, two of them, and neither one of them has ever exactly been a comfort to bring up.

"Kai, obviously. Rhys is still in London being insufferable at close range. Kai's the one who's an entire ocean away being insufferable remotely, which, frankly, is his one redeeming quality."

Kai. Twenty-five now, finishing his final year of a hockey program here in Manhattan that has scouts from actual professional teams apparently circling like well-dressed vultures. Rhys, his twin, stayed in London for university instead, reads finance, has the same face as his brother stretched over a softer, less athletic frame, and has spent the better part of the last year suddenly, aggressively pretending to like me, which I find, if anything, more suspicious than the nine years he spent barely tolerating me before that. Both of them have been, since I was ten years old, some combination of careless and cruel, and I have spent nine years building an entire personality around not letting either of them see that any of it ever landed.

"My face isn't doing anything."

"Your face is doing several things. I've catalogued at least three separate expressions in the last ten minutes, and none of them were about turbulence."

I didn't have a good answer for that, mostly because she wasn't wrong, so I simply turned back to the window and let the subject drop, watching Manhattan's skyline emerge through the clouds, sharp and glittering and entirely unbothered by whatever chaos had apparently taken up residence in the back of my skull.

~~~~~~~~

The exam period we'd just survived had been, without exaggeration, the single worst week of my academic life, four papers in five days, a dissertation proposal due the same week as our architecture history final, and a group project partner who had, memorably, had a complete breakdown in the library at two in the morning three days before submission, forcing the rest of us to quietly absorb his workload while also pretending not to notice him crying into a stack of reference books.

I'm reading architecture, on a scholarship I worked myself half to death for, at a university full of people who've never once had to think about the cost of anything. Zara reads history of art, mostly because her mother considers it an acceptable finishing touch on a girl who's supposedly destined for a good marriage rather than a career, a plan Zara has no intention of following and has not yet worked up the nerve to say so directly to her mother's face.

"I genuinely cannot believe we survived that," I'd told Zara, the two of us collapsed on the library steps after our final paper, giddy with the particular delirium that only arrives after weeks of insufficient sleep. "I think I wrote the word 'notwithstanding' so many times in that last essay it's stopped looking like a real word."

"It's not a real word. I've decided. We've collectively hallucinated an entire vocabulary from stress."

"That tracks."

"Do you think Professor Okafor actually reads all of these, or does she just weigh the stack and assign grades based on heft?"

"I think," I'd offered, "that if that were true, I would have gotten significantly higher marks for my dissertation proposal, given how much I padded it."

Zara had laughed so hard she'd nearly rolled off the library steps entirely, and it had felt, in that moment, like the purest kind of relief, the specific, giddy exhaustion of having survived something together, and it was that exact feeling, riding high through the last day of exams, that had made the idea of a spontaneous trip to New York feel less like a wild impulse and more like the only reasonable response to nine months of unrelenting academic pressure.

"We deserve this," Zara had announced, scrolling through concert dates on her phone while we waited for the bus. "We deserve an entire week of doing absolutely nothing productive whatsoever."

"I have a dissertation to actually write eventually."

"Eventually is doing a lot of work in that sentence. Eventually is not this week. This week we are unhinged tourists with disposable time and a mutual, deeply held belief that Iris Starr's new album is a religious experience."

"It genuinely might be."

"See, this is why we're best friends. Shared delusions, expensive concert tickets, and an unshakeable belief in the transformative power of Afrobeats."

I'd laughed and let her pull me along, exhausted and giddy and thoroughly ready to leave the entire semester behind for seven blissful days, and now, watching Manhattan rise up beneath the plane's wing, I let myself feel that same reckless, relieved excitement again, pushing the strange dream firmly out of my mind, or at least pretending to, which was, in my experience, usually close enough.

The plane touched down with a gentle bump, and the cabin erupted into the familiar shuffle of unbuckling seatbelts and reaching for overhead bins, and Zara was already bouncing slightly in her seat with barely contained excitement.

"We're here," she announced. "We're actually here. Seven days, zero responsibilities, one incredible concert, and absolutely no Ashworth-Vane men anywhere in sight."

I smiled and told her that sounded perfect, and meant it, and had absolutely no idea, deplaning into the crowded chaos of JFK with my suitcase and my paperback and my carefully buried two-year-old dream, exactly how spectacularly that particular promise was about to fall apart, starting with the text message that lit up my phone the second I switched off airplane mode.

It wasn't from my mum’s number. It wasn't my dad’s either. But somewhere along those lines.

My stomach dropped straight through the airport floor, and somewhere behind me, Zara's phone buzzed at the exact same moment, and her delighted, exasperated groan told me everything I needed to know before she even opened her mouth.

"Oh, for God's sake," she groaned, staring at her own screen. "Change of plans. Apparently my idiot brother knows we're in his city, and apparently he has opinions about it."