Total pages in book: 151
Estimated words: 140874 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 704(@200wpm)___ 563(@250wpm)___ 470(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 140874 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 704(@200wpm)___ 563(@250wpm)___ 470(@300wpm)
“Emma, the last party I threw was like, twenty people in my apartment. This is…huge.” Sudden panic gripped me. “Do you know who we’re supposed to invite? When we did the party before his transplant, Neil said Valerie knew who to invite. But I don’t have a list or anything. And I really, really don’t want to involve your mother in this.”
There. I’d said it. I didn’t want Valerie to be in charge of stuff for the party. This was my boyfriend’s fiftieth birthday party, and I wanted to be the one planning it. I didn’t want to make it a joint effort with his ex.
“Believe me, I don’t want her coming in and taking this over, too. It’s a miracle I got to pick out my own bloody wedding gown,” she said with a weary sigh. “But in this, we might have to make a concession. We’ve only got two months to send out invites.”
I drummed my fingers on the tabletop. “You know what? Let me figure something out. Give me like, two days.”
“You have two days. After that, you have to call my mother.”
Emma was a great party planner, which was fortunate, since I was used to throwing the kind of shindigs where ice was dumped into the sink to store beverages. She had ideas about traffic flow, table decorations, dance floor space, number of servers… No wonder she and her mother had the entire wedding wrapped up. The only thing I could really contribute was a suggestion about the music. We opted for a DJ, rather than a live band, so we could play songs from all five decades of Neil’s life as the evening progressed.
We were nearly finished making our plans—and eating our lunch—when Emma snapped her fingers. “I almost forgot! If you guys end up moving before the party, you’ll need to make reservations to stay in the city overnight. You won’t want to go all the way back to Sagaponack late at night.”
“You’re right.” The solution came to me in flash of uncensored inspiration. “Oh my gosh! I’ll get the Wow suite!”
“Oh, that ugly place Dad was staying after the divorce? Why?” She wrinkled her nose.
“It was where we had our first date. Or…unofficial first date, I guess?” I waved off the further explanation she wouldn’t want. “It’s a part of our history.”
A part of our history in which I had waited for him on the sofa, fingering myself, so that when he’d arrived he’d found me with my legs spread and my hand in my panties. I could still vividly hear him ordering me to take them off, could see him lifting them to his nose and sniffing deeply.
Okay, I would get the Wow suite for the night after his birthday, since I was sure we’d be drunk as hell after the party.
“That’s quite sweet,” Emma said, surprising me. She usually turned up her nose at anything having to do with her father and romance. She put her iPad back into her bag. “Okay, so you’ll check on the addresses and come up with a DJ?”
“Yeah, I’ve got a pretty good idea of what Neil likes, music wise.” I shrugged. “And I can always ‘accidentally’ mix up our phones and check out what’s he’s listening to lately.”
“Wonderful. I’ll confirm with the venue, and then all that’s left is you getting him to the party. How do you plan to do that?”
“I thought I could tell him we’re going out for dinner, and you could text me while we’re in the car. Say you’re at the club and you’ve forgotten your wallet. And we’ll have to swing by and pay your tab…” I raised my eyebrows and nodded to gently urge her in my direction.
She remained unimpressed. “He’s going to see right through that. Tell him Michael forgot his wallet. He’ll be so excited at the chance to rescue me from my fiancé’s incompetence he won’t question it for a moment.”
“Ooh, good idea,” I agreed. Then I thought of what Valerie and I had talked about the other night. “You know…I think your dad is slowly warming up to Michael. I don’t think they’ll ever be best friends—”
“Spare me, Sophie,” she said with a weighty eye-roll. “I’m at peace with the fact that my father will never like my husband. At least it will keep family gatherings interesting…”
She kept talking, but her words were drowned out by the rush of adrenaline-infused blood straight to my brain. A flash of ruby red had caught my eye, a distinctive shade that I hadn’t thought of in months.
It was Gabriella Winters’s hair color, and she had just passed by my table on the way out of the restaurant.
“Sophie?” Emma asked, stopping mid-sentence to look at me in alarm. “Are you all right?”
I turned to follow Gabriella with my eyes; I couldn’t help it. It was like seeing the ghost of someone you didn’t like all that well. But it was so, so much worse than that, because walking with her, laughing loudly at something Gabriella had said, was Deja.