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The entire shape of the day realigns itself in a single breath.

“I lied to you,” Milo announces, unbothered, reaching for more soup. “You have the same face as the Human Volcano and the same last name. I was not about to let another one of those walk my sister home.” He studies me for a moment. “I have decided you are the better copy of the two, though.”

“You were protecting your family,” I tell him, and I mean the praise fully. He’s eight years old, and he planted himself between his sister and a stranger with a dangerous face, and he did it with his whole small chest. “Keep that up, and one Saturday I will teach you a proper left hook,” I add, and his eyes go huge.

Delaney stares at him, stunned. Milo fights down a smile and loses the fight.

Relief slams through me then, fast and total and far too honest. She’s not a mother. No bastard forced a child on a fifteen-year-old girl. Nothing was taken from her in that particular way after all.

I sit with the sheer size of my own relief and I don’t like what it tells me. Am I glad because the man I invented doesn’t exist to be hunted? Or am I glad because the road to having her runs clear now, and I can take her with no shadow standing between us? Fuck, but neither answer is a comfortable one for a man like me to hold.

And underneath both of them, quieter and far more dangerous than simply wanting to fuck her ever was, sits the thing I’ve been refusing to name all afternoon, watching her ruffle her brother’s hair in a shabby rented room held together with cardboard and thread.

I care about her, this stubborn, exhausted, sharp-tongued, soft-bodied woman with a brother instead of a son.

God help me, I truly fucking do.

10

DELANEY

The day at the camp already feels like a dream that dissolved the moment I woke from it.

For days afterward I didn’t see Lev at all. Gowns arrived in his place, and velvet boxes of jewelry, delivered by silent men who didn’t wait around for thanks. He never once appeared behind any of them. Then this evening a car came, and he rode beside me to a banquet so opulent it makes my throat go tight, and he told me in the low dark of the back seat, his hand high on my thigh, that the apricot gown was driving him out of his goddamn mind.

However, the moment we step inside, the crowd swallows him whole.

He wears a classic black suit with a tie patterned so faintly you have to be close to see it at all, his silver hair slicked back, and he becomes the gravity of the entire room. Men angle their bodies toward him. Women find reasons to drift closer to him. I understand very clearly I don’t belong in this picture, so the moment his attention is pulled away, I slip off to a quiet corner with a glass of champagne worth more than a week of my rent and a plate of small, strange, delicious things.

“Oh my goodness. Delaney?”

Only one person alive can make my own name sound like a filthy little insult.

Vanessa glides up in a cloud of pink, feigning delight. “I cannot believe it. A dress that actually fits that body for once. Look at you, almost passing for upper class.”

“Vanessa, how nice,” I say, letting my eyes travel over her, the blush gown, the feathered clutch, the baroque pearls at her throat. The whole picture would be stunning if her face were not wearing that particular expression. “I love the clutch.” Sweetness costs me nothing and buys me a moment to sharpen my own knife.

“You always were so sensitive.” She loops an arm around my shoulders and sinks her nails in through the fabric like a claw. “So who dragged you to a place like this? Some generous new sugar daddy of yours?”

“Are you scouting for another boyfriend to steal out from under me?” I ask, keeping my voice perfectly pleasant.

I’ve never once understood the sick engine that drives her to tear me apart every time we breathe the same air. She has the ring, the fiancé, the whole life she wanted. She still can’t seem to leave me alone.

Her smile slips. Then she points, loud and theatrical, at a balding man across the room who has indeed been staring at me. “Oh, sweetie, no. Him? Well, I suppose a desperate man like that would find you exotic.” She presses a hand to her chest in mock horror while the nearest heads turn. “Your taste really has fallen, hasn’t it.”

I set my glass down before I do something to her face that the champagne would enjoy far too much. The apricot silk hugs every curve I own, and I remember Lev’s mouth at my ear in the car. It hugs the same curves his hands owned in that office. Older memories rise instead, unbidden, of another party years ago, a bodycon dress, a whole room telling me I looked incredible, and Vanessa waiting until they were gone to inform me my waist was pure flab and every compliment had been pity for the fat girl.

I see it now for exactly what it always was. Not concern.

Ugly, rotten envy, start to finish.

“Honestly, it doesn’t matter what you drape over it,” Vanessa sighs. “Cheap stays cheap. You still look like a fat little charity case under all that expensive fabric.”

“I see myself just fine, Vanessa,” I say, calm and even.

Let her choke on it. And a cold clarity in me understands that she is only this vicious tonight because I look too good, and it is eating her alive. A chain I didn’t even know I was still wearing snaps clean off. Weeks of Lev looking at me like he wants to devour me have taught my own body how to belong to me. Vanessa’s contempt hits that new certainty and freezes on the surface of it.

“You are the jealous one here,” I say, louder now. “You never could stand it when someone else wanted me. That has always been the whole story of us.”