Chapter 9 #2
I sucked in a harsh breath. Imogen was the only one of us that had had regular contact with Dad after he left.
For a few months, she lied to us about where she was going so she could stay overnight with him—and by extension Hilary—for a night most weekends.
She told me it only ended when Hilary got pregnant and Imogen realized that Dad had moved on with his new family and that he would always see her second to his new baby.
When she’d revealed the truth about it all to me, I hadn’t been surprised by that in the slightest. Really, the pain I felt from the reveal had mostly come from the fact that she’d lied to me about it for so long.
“What did he say?” I asked carefully. I wasn’t sure if I wanted to know, but I couldn’t leave it there.
She rolled her eyes. “Nothing important. Asking if we needed him to order us dresses. Like he’s just expecting us to show up at the country club, sip bottomless mimosas, and smile for photos like good little daughters.”
“He’s delusional,” I said flatly. “He thinks if he throws enough money at a party, it erases the last ten months. Standing around watching Hilary open sterling silver rattles while Dad acts like a proud, youthful father would make me physically throw up.”
“I know,” Imogen said. “I know it’s absurd.
And I told myself I didn’t care, especially when Seb swore he’d break his own ankle before putting on a suit for them, and Lavender said she never wanted to see Hilary again in her life.
” She paused, her fingers picking at the edge of her binder.
“But every time I think about not going, I get this weird, sick feeling in my stomach.”
I wanted to say something—something encouraging, something that would help this situation—but the words got stuck in my throat.
And what was there to say really? That I’d felt the same way, once or twice?
That when I tried to imagine a future where I completely cut Dad off and never met my little sister, something about it felt wrong?
“It’s not about him,” Imogen continued, her voice dropping so low I had to lean in closer to hear her over the hiss of the espresso machine.
“That’s the thing. I don’t give a damn about Dad’s feelings, and I definitely don’t care about Hilary’s.
But... there’s going to be a baby, Ainsley.
An actual baby. In just over a month, there’s going to be a little girl who shares half our DNA, and if we refuse to be there from the very beginning, then we’re letting Dad and Hilary build a wall around her.
She’s going to grow up thinking her half-sisters hated her before she was even born. ”
I swallowed hard, the cold, hollow ache settling deep in my chest. I hadn’t let myself think about that part. It was so much easier to stay angry at Dad, to mock the lavish registry, to treat the whole thing like a grotesque circus.
“We can’t control what Dad tells her, Imogen,” I said softly, though the words felt flimsy even to me.
“No, but we control whether we show up,” Imogen replied, her sharp edge softening into something raw and fragile.
“I hate the baby shower. I hate the theme, I hate the country club, and I hate that Dad is acting like he’s starting a brand-new, perfect family.
But I don’t want to hate the baby. And I don’t want to be the bitter older sister who vanished. ”
I stared at my twin, watching the heavy weight she’d been carrying all week finally spill out onto the table.
“So what do we do?” I asked quietly.
Imogen let out a slow, trembling breath and leaned back in her chair. “I don’t know. I honestly don’t know.”
My room was, by design, the least Rhys-Montgomery-friendly space in the entire town of North Glen.
White walls, a pink duvet with a pink canopy draped over my bed that I’d begged my parents for when I was twelve, a string of fairy lights looped along the ceiling that I only ever turned on when I wanted the room to feel like it belonged in a softer, less complicated version of my life.
My speaker sat propped on the windowsill, blasting the same playlist I’d had on repeat since February, loud enough that the bass rattled the little dish of hair clips on my desk every time the chorus hit.
I was sprawled across my bed on my stomach, chemistry textbook open to a page I’d been staring at for twenty minutes without absorbing a single word of it, when my phone buzzed against the duvet.
I glanced at the screen, and my stomach did the small, familiar drop it had started doing every time his name showed up anywhere near my life, which I was choosing, for my own sanity, not to examine.
That Guy was the contact name I’d saved him under on the weekend, mostly because I knew I couldn’t have his real name saved in my phone and I hadn’t been able to come up with a clever nickname for him.
I couldn’t exactly save him as “fake boyfriend.” I just hoped Kelcey never happened to see his contact in my phone, because I’d have a heck of a time trying to explain this one away to her.
I answered warily, one hand still holding my pencil like I might get back to my homework any second now. “What?”
“Is that any way to greet your boyfriend?”
“Fake boyfriend,” I clarified. “Real relationships don’t usually have rules and timelines.”
“—can’t hear a word you’re saying.” His voice came through half-swallowed by static, or maybe just by the music I had blaring, which admittedly was loud enough to be a legitimate structural hazard at this point. “Hang on—is that music? Turn it down.”
“No.”
“I can’t hear you over it!”
“That’s a you problem.” I rolled onto my back, holding the phone a few inches from my ear so the chorus didn’t drown him out completely, and immediately got far too much enjoyment out of making him repeat himself.
“What is that, a concert? Are you hosting a concert in your bedroom?”
“How do you know I’m in my bedroom?” I teased. “Maybe I ran off to Toronto for a concert. You don’t know.”
“I can see your bedroom light on.”
“Stalker.” I resisted the urge to get up and look out my window to see if I could see his room.
It never occurred to me to try it before—then again, until Saturday night, I hadn’t even known which room was his.
“And it’s a playlist. A normal amount of music, at a normal volume, that only sounds insane to people with delicate, aging eardrums.”
“I’m seventeen.”
“Seventeen going on seventy, apparently, if a little Top 40 sends you into a panic.” I sat up and reached for the volume dial on my speaker, turning it down exactly one notch out of some small, grudging mercy, and immediately regretted the gesture, because it meant I could hear him breathe out something that sounded suspiciously like a laugh.
“For the record, I talk to Nora and Clementine with this exact volume going all the time and neither of them has ever once complained.”
“Maybe they’re being polite.”
“Or maybe you’re just fragile.”
“I played through a torn ligament in October. I am not fragile.”
“That says more about your poor decision-making than your resilience, but sure.” I got up off the bed and started pacing the narrow strip of carpet between my desk and my dresser, phone pinned between my shoulder and my ear, twisting a piece of hair around one finger without noticing I was doing it until it was already too tightly wound to pretend otherwise.
“Why are you calling, anyway? You’ve never called me before. We text like normal people.”
“This required an actual conversation, not a string of typos.” A pause that made me think he was choosing his next sentence with more care than usual, which put me instantly on guard. “You need to come to my game this week.”
I stopped pacing. “Absolutely not.”
“It’s not a request.”
“When I went to the gym with you, you said I didn’t have to do it and I chose to anyway. I assume this falls under the same category.”
“Fine. It’s a demand, then, dressed up as a request for your comfort.
” I could practically hear the smugness through the phone, and I hated how easily I could picture the exact expression that went with it—one eyebrow up, mouth doing the thing where it almost smiled.
“Tomorrow at seven. Home game. You’re coming, and you’re dressing up. ”
I finally gave in and wandered over to my window, tugging the curtain aside with two fingers, and there it was, same as always—his house, four doors down and across the street, porch light on, one upstairs window lit gold against the darkening sky.
There was no shadow there now, but he must have been there before if he knew my light was on.
“Define dressing up,” I said, letting the curtain fall back into place and forcing myself away from the window like a normal person.
“Crofton colors. Full effort. The kind of thing people notice.”
My stomach did something considerably less pleasant than the earlier drop. “Wait. Please tell me it’s not against Parkhurst.”
Surely, I would know if there was a Parkhurst soccer game tomorrow—especially against Crofton—since I went to almost all of Sebastian’s games, but I had a sudden sinking feeling in my stomach.
Even if it wasn’t happening tomorrow, I knew there was another match between our schools before the end of the year.
What if Rhys still wanted to keep up this fake dating ruse by then? What would I do?
“It’s not against Parkhurst.” A beat. “Why? Would that be a problem?”