Page 85 of Ruthless Edge

Knox

The ballroom is everything Emma built it to be, and she isn't here to see it. Grant it, the event has just barely begun, but she’s not required to be here now. Everything she was responsible for is done.

She can choose to simply… not show up.

That's the thought that keeps finding me as I stand at the bar with Ethan and Jace and Declan, a drink I've barely touched in my hand, watching the room fill with people who have no idea how close this whole thing came to being a shadow of what it is now. The school colors are everywhere, light blue and white draped from the ceiling in long panels that catch the chandelier light. White linen on every table. The centerpieces are low and full, white flowers and blue ribbon. I remember Emma at our third planning meeting with a photo on her phone, asking me if it was too simple, and I said no, it's exactly right, and I was correct.

Hacksack Blues is already on their third song. Six or seven couples are on the dance floor. The room is warm and alive and genuinely beautiful, and Emma built all of it, and she's not here.

I look at the door.

“Where is she?”

“She’s coming,” Jace says softly.

“And what if she doesn’t?” The thought makes me sick.

Then, is that it? Is that my one chance with her… just gone? I know it’s sappy. I know it’s crazy. But I can picture a whole future with Emma. One with lots of laughter, a wedding, and kids.

I just need her to walk through that door.

“She’ll come, just have faith,” Jace tells me, patting me on the shoulder.

He knows me, so he just orders another drink and turns back toward the dance floor, and I go back to looking at the room and thinking about things I'd rather not think about.

I've been going over it since last night. Running it end to end, trying to understand how three years went by without me knowing. I couldn't make it to the auction. I remember there was a conflict, something that felt important, I don't even remember what it was now. I'd asked Laura to go and find out who had won the bid on me, since I was stuck getting a gash stitched on my cheek. She came back and said nobody had bid. That the auction was thin. I remember being briefly disappointed. Then I moved on, because I really didn’t care that much about spending an evening with some older donor, and I didn't think about it again.

Meanwhile Emma was at that gala.

She'd bid. She won. She sat at a table in a dress she probably picked carefully, and she waited, and I didn't come, and then Laura walked across the room and told her I didn't want to be seen with the fat girl.

Something in my chest goes cold and wrong every time I get to that part.

Emma showed me a side of Laura I never imagined, but I still wouldn’t have thought her capable of that. What I still can't fully hold onto is what Emma has been carrying. Years of believing that. Years of looking straight through me on campus, of keeping every wall up, of doing this job alongside me every week while knowing what she thought she knew, which was that I had looked at her and decided she wasn't worth my time. And she never said it. She just endured it and held the wall up, because why would you tell the person who humiliated you that his presence keeps reopening the wound?

She had every reason to believe I was exactly who she thought I was.

From where she was standing, I deserved every bit of it.

"Stop staring at the door," Ethan says. "You look unwell."

"I'm fine."

"You look desperate."

"I am."

“Rory isn’t here either. None of the girls are yet, so don’t worry. Maybe there was a hair incident.”

“Maybe.”

"I'm just saying, if she doesn't⁠—"

"She has to come," I say.

Nobody has come through the main doors in a few minutes. I know this because I have been watching the main doors the entire time. The only people coming through them are donors and faculty and couples who have nothing to do with Emma Lawson or the way I've ruined the past three years of my life by accident.

My brother Blake appears from somewhere further down the bar. He reaches past me for a cocktail napkin, picks up his drink, and says into the middle distance, "She'll come."