Total pages in book: 93
Estimated words: 87601 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 438(@200wpm)___ 350(@250wpm)___ 292(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 87601 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 438(@200wpm)___ 350(@250wpm)___ 292(@300wpm)
She could be right, I guess, but I’m certainly not expecting anything tonight. The party will be full of Adrian’s pretentious friends, artistic people who pity my sad, business life, and models hired to stand around looking bored and fabulous.
Oh, and Adrian’s dad, who will probably be a jerk and make me feel sorry for Adrian, giving him the leverage he’ll need to force me to stay at this party far later than I’ll want to.
When Noelle’s done arranging my hair in a pretty spill of curls and I’ve allowed her to do my eyes and lips—though I refuse blush on the grounds that it makes me feel like a clown, no matter how tastefully it’s applied—I catch her elbow on the way to her bedroom door.
“Hey,” I say, when she turns back to me. “Can we have a safe word? Like, something I say if I need to leave the party before Adrian’s ready, and I don’t want to deal with a big negotiation about it?”
She nods. “Absolutely. Just say the word, and I’ll call you a car and make sure you’re in it. Ben and I are staying sober tonight. He never drinks at art world events. He wants people to take him seriously as an artist, not think of him as a kid who likes to party.”
“Smart. And thank you,” I say, approving of Ben’s maturity. Noelle’s lucky to have found him, and Adrian’s lucky to have a best friend with such a good head on his shoulders.
I start to move past Noelle when she pokes my arm. “So?”
“So what?”
“So, what’s your safe word? You never said.”
“Oh.” I laugh and shake my head. “It’s good I’m getting out. Clearly, all the corporate research is wrecking my brain.” I pull in a breath, searching for a good word. “How about…bacon, egg, and cheese,” I say, thinking fondly of the puppies and hoping they’ve found homes with people who love them. “I’ll say I’m hungry for one and you put me in a cab. Deal?”
“Deal, baby. I got you,” she says, looping her thin arm around my waist. “But don’t head out too soon. The real party doesn’t even start until midnight, and we’re going to have a blast. I feel it in my bones.”
She’s so sure of herself that I catch some of her excitement. But I have no clue just how “exciting” tonight is going to turn out to be.
eleven
GIDEON
New York City. She’s like an old girlfriend I haven’t seen in years.
I watch the skyline grow closer beneath the small commercial jet with a belly full of mixed emotions.
As a kid growing up on Long Island, I couldn’t wait to turn eighteen and move to Manhattan. I wanted to be where everything was happening, all the time. As much as I loved being out on a trail or at a campsite, I loved the fevered heartbeat of the city even more.
There was always something to do or someone interesting to see.
And Columbia was there—Columbia, my father’s alma mater and one of the best real estate law programs in the country. When I was younger, the plan was to become a lawyer and help my father grow his real estate empire in the posh seaside communities of New York and New Jersey.
Then Angela got pregnant during our sophomore year of high school, and everything changed.
I still ended up going to Columbia for undergrad and law school—with the help of my parents, who moved to an apartment in the city near our student family housing to help care for Adrian while Angela and I were in class—but by the time I graduated with my law degree, my parents were barely speaking to me. My mother never forgave me for letting Angela take Adrian with her on the road while I finished up my final year of law school.
She was afraid that Angela wouldn’t bring him back, and that I’d have a hard time proving I deserved custody when I hadn’t put up a fight to keep my child with me in the city, but I didn’t believe her. I believed Angela when she said she loved me, but that she desperately needed to make her dream of being a professional dancer come true. I believed her when she insisted that Adrian would be devastated if he couldn’t see his mother for eight months, and that they’d be back before I knew it.
Honestly, I didn’t see how I could say no.
She’d given up so much to have our son. When her fundamentalist parents found out that she was pregnant at sixteen, they disowned her. She had to move in with a friend and then with my family, once Adrian was born and we were officially engaged.
She also lost her summer dance scholarship with the New York City ballet and never got back on toe shoes again. Pregnancy did something to her feet, she said, that made the wooden boxes of the shoes too painful. She’d done her best to make it in the modern dance world, while taking business classes at NYU and caring for Adrian. But in four years of devoting every spare moment to classes, free performances, and networking at dance world parties, she had yet to land a paying gig.