Page 67 of Ruthless Edge

He closes it.

"I'll text you a time and a place," I say. "You show up. You follow my lead. That's all you have to do."

"What are you planning?"

"You'll see when you get there."

His eyes narrow slightly, curious and also something else, something that looks like anticipation. "When?"

"I'll let you know."

"Emma—"

"Knox." I pick up my glass. "Do you trust me?"

There's a beat. Something in his face settles.

"Yes," he says. Simple. No qualifier.

I look at him. The word sits there between us, and I don't know what to do with how directly he said it, so I say, "Good. Then show up when I tell you."

He nods. And then, because he can't leave anything alone, he adds, "You know you just voluntarily planned to spend another day with me."

"Don't make it weird."

"I'm not making it anything. I'm just noting⁠—"

"Knox."

"I'm noted," he says, and grins, and I look away out at the lake before I do something inadvisable like grin back.

The check comes and Knox takes it before I can reach for it, and I let him. I don’t know why.

We walk out through the lobby and past the ballroom hallway and back through the front entrance, and the March air is cold after the warmth of the restaurant, and Knox walks beside me toward the car. He opens my door. I get in without saying anything about it.

He gets on his side and starts the engine, and I look at his profile, his hands on the wheel, about to pull out of the parking space, and my thoughts feel heavy.

If Knox is telling the truth about Laura, then I've been wrong about at least one major thing for a long time. Every time I've told myself he was with Laura, every time I used it to build distance between us, I was building it out of something that wasn't true.

He might be telling me what I want to hear. That's possible. But I've been watching Knox's face all afternoon and I've gotten reasonably good at reading it, and when he said nothing has ever happened with Laura, I didn't find the lie.

I don't know what to do with that yet.

I know I'm going to prove the Laura thing next weekend. I know what I'll see when I do, because I've watched Laura work for an entire semester and there is nothing uncertain about what she wants.

What I'm not ready to look at too directly is why it matters. Why disproving one thing Knox said would change anything, when there are so many other things I'd have to stop being angry about. When the gala is still coming and the auction is still coming and after that Knox Carter goes back to being a hockey player who sat next to me in class once and then didn't show up.

Knox pulls onto the highway and reaches for his phone. Hacksack Blues again. He glances at me sideways and starts singing, already slightly wrong, and I look out the window at the water passing on our left and think that I'll deal with the rest of it later.

"It's a lighthouse," I say.

"Life vest," he says, and keeps singing.

Chapter Seventeen

Emma

The fitting room looks like a fabric explosion.