Chapter 31
thirty-one
SLOANE
Ivy is holding a champagne flute she definitely did not get carded for, and she’s using it to point across the Halden University ballroom at a man in a suit, a navy-blue bow tie, and a Halden Hockey lapel pin.
“Ten dollars says he owns a boat,” she says, sloshing champagne onto the floor.
“That’s not a bet.” I grin. “It’s a diagnosis.”
“Ten dollars says the boat’s named after his mistress, and the dog after his first ex-wife.”
I laugh, sharper than I should, because we’re at a major athletics fundraiser and the acoustics are merciless — forty feet of vaulted stone handing every cough and whisper back to the room with interest.
Two hundred people in cocktail attire are milling under a truly aggressive number of Halden Hockey banners, and even the bartenders are wearing bow ties in the school colors, which is more than I would do for minimum wage plus tips.
“And her.” Ivy tips her chin in the same direction, where a woman in a floor-length navy gown cuts through the crowd toward him. “Wife number three, incoming.”
“She doesn’t want the ring.” I laugh. “She wants her name on the boat.”
“It’s neck and neck.”
I steal a cube of cheese off a passing tray, because I skipped dinner to do my hair and now I’m starving. It’s some aged Gruyère, the kind with the farm’s name typed onto a little placard, and I take two more before the tray escapes.
“Classy,” Ivy says.
“My mother taught me you can’t network on only one canapé.” I pop the second cube. “It’s the only useful thing she’s ever taught me.”
“Not like it’s going to go to your ass, I guess.” Ivy sighs. “If I look at cheese the wrong way, I won’t fit into that.”
She gestures at my dress, which is green. Not Ravens navy, not silver, not anything else that could pass for school spirit — just a bright, warm green. It’s cut a little low and a little high, and wearing it makes me feel good in a way I’m only just getting used to again.
Ivy looks like she’s about to murder someone: black slip dress, boots, eyeliner sharp enough to cut. She told me she was dressing “for the energy I want to attract,” then refused to elaborate, which left me wondering who she’s trying to threaten or intimidate.
“Four people have clocked your boots,” I tell her.
“Only four?” She sighs. “Should’ve worn the fishnets.”
“Then you might have had your name on a boat…”
“Ick.” She laughs, then studies me. “You good?”
“Yeah.”
“Actually good?”
“Actually good,” I say.
“Unrecognizable,” a familiar voice says from behind me. “Look at you, Sloane.”
Professor Moreno catches my elbow before I can answer — pearls, structured navy blazer, hair in a tight bun — and she’s smiling at about sixty percent warmth and forty percent assessment, which is a better ratio than most people get.
“Professor Moreno, hi.” I straighten up, because she still makes me want to stand like I’ve done the reading. “This is Ivy.”
She nods to Ivy, then shifts back to me. “I won’t make promises in a room full of lawyers, but the committee met Tuesday and the funding is all but certain.”
It takes a second to land. I submitted that application alone in my room at two in the morning the night after the pool, chlorine still in my hair. I knew then that a research grant for a first-year student was a long shot, but no more a long shot than Rowan and me.
It’s been a few weeks since the pool, and I keep waiting for Rowan and me to curdle into the thing I was braced for — the managing, the quiet rearranging of my life around his — and it hasn’t. He lets me be loud, asks what I want instead of deciding it for me, and it’s wonderful.
“Thank you, Professor,” I say. “I couldn’t have done it without your support these last few months.”
“Don’t thank me or underestimate yourself.” Her smile twitches closer to seventy. “You earned it. We’ll talk when the offer comes.”
And, like that, she nods and cuts back into the crowd.
Ivy bumps my shoulder. “You did a thing. A real thing. With paperwork.”
“Three binders’ worth.”
“Disgusting.” She grins. “I’ve never been prouder.”
We go back to people-watching, and the room fills as the evening deepens. Eventually I lose Ivy to a girl she knows from Sterling, dodge a booster’s wife who wants to tell me her niece also studies communications, and escape to the bar for a sparkling water and a minute to myself.
Only then do I look around again for Rowan, who arrived with me but vanished into Very Important Captain Business within ten seconds. But before I can find him in the crowd, someone steps beside me and puts a hand on my arm.
“Sloane,” he says.
I turn, and I know who it is instantly.
Patrick Cross is wearing a charcoal suit, white shirt, and a Halden tie that looks freshly pressed. In his hand, he’s holding a lowball of something amber with the ease of a man who has been comfortable in rooms like this his whole life.
I’ve never met him, but I Googled him plenty when he started giving Rowan grief, and Mason talked about his father enough that I feel as if I know him. And he’s alone, with me, which doesn’t feel like an accident.
“It’s been a difficult few weeks for my son,” he says, swirling the glass and taking a small sip. “The suspension.”
I don’t say anything.
“And it’s based on some serious claims by you.” He straightens his cuff. “Claims that made their way into institutional files.”
What he doesn’t know is that this stopped being a thing I can be talked out of weeks ago. Rowan filed the first report — my name, my story, set down without me — and when I found out, it cut deep.
So I went to the conduct office myself, on a gray Tuesday morning. I read every line Rowan had written, confirmed it in my own words, and signed it as my complaint, not his. The file that suspended Mason is mine now — and, for once, so is the record.
Cross also doesn’t know the truth about the photos — Mason never had them.
He let me believe he was holding the match and used the birthmark to prove it, and I believed him, because after you’ve been burned once, you stop asking whether the next fire is real. But it was all based on hearsay, and the photos were a bluff.
The story was the only weapon he ever truly had, and he already fired it, and I’m still standing. And now, whatever leverage Cross thinks he carried into this room, it doesn’t scare me. Because it was never real either.
“They’re not claims,” I say. “They’re facts.”
“They’re not facts.” He smiles like his son does and I want to slap it off his face. “They’re a version of events, and those get complicated for a young woman who felt hurt.”
“I was hurt,” I say. “And while I appreciate that you’re looking out for your son, I’m not interested in walking any of it back.”
The smile doesn’t move. “That’s the complication.”
“I pride myself on being a complication, Mr. Cross,” I say.
And then I wait for the Halden Girl to chime in.
But she doesn’t.
“Here’s where we are.” He sets his glass on the bar. “You find whoever you need to tell and you tell them you made it up. You were upset. You exaggerated. It got out of hand.”
“Why would I do that?”
“You say the words, and all the stuff about your boyfriend will go away.” He lowers his voice further, and his pleasant face doesn’t change.
“He’s chasing a contract, and the men who hand those out ask for my read on a kid first. The talent was never the question, but the judgment and the company he keeps are. ”
My throat closes. And then the Halden Girl is right back there.
Unsay it.
Be smaller.
Take the deal.
Save the boy.
Slide the whole thing back into the dark where men like this prefer girls to stay.
It would be so easy to find the right person, say the right words, and fold myself into exactly what he needs. And it would help Rowan, because there’s no doubt that Patrick Cross can cause him problems, but then I think about Rowan and me in the pool and the weeks since.
He’s the last person who would want the Halden Girl to come back.
And I’m not about to decide what he can survive one more time.
“No,” I say.
Patrick blinks.
“Hey.” Ivy plants herself next to me, glaring daggers at Cross. “Are you okay?”
“She’s fine,” Cross says, not looking at her. “We’re nearly finished.”
That’s what does it. Not the offer of a deal, but the flick of his attention past Ivy: one more girl told that this doesn’t concern her. Because this moment — all these moments — concerns all of us, and I refuse to let another guy like this get away with it.
So I don’t lower my voice, and I don’t back down.
“Mr. Cross offered me a deal,” I say. “I publicly call myself a liar to protect his son from consequences, or he makes sure the future of the person I love falls apart.”
The people nearest us stop talking, heads turning.
“Sloane,” Cross says, very quietly. “You’re making a scene.”
“Yeah. I am.”
“This is not the place.”
“It’s exactly the place.” I bare my teeth in something that isn’t a smile. “You picked it.”
Ivy settles at my left shoulder, chin up. She doesn’t step in and she doesn’t say a word. She’s letting me have the moment, even though she’d go to war the second I ask her to, and I love her so much for it.
So I turn so the room can hear me.
“When I was eighteen, I sent private photos to a boy and he passed them around. And when it blew up, the adults decided the problem wasn’t the boy but me for trusting him. So they made me the cautionary tale, shipped me three states away, and told me to be quiet.”
My voice is steady, and louder than I’ve let it be in a year.
“I came to Halden and I made myself small, pleasant, and easy to be around. I smiled on cue and never took up too much room, because I had already learned what this world does to a girl who takes up too much room.”
As I speak, the circle around us pulls closer and closer.
I turn back to Cross. “And your son dragged it all back into the open to humiliate me and get at Rowan. That’s why he’s suspended.
” My voice cracks, and I let it. “And now you—” The word won’t come, and I don’t chase it.
“I know this part. I’ve lived it. You make me the unstable one.
The one who exaggerated, who made a scene, who’s the problem. ”
He holds up a hand. “That’s enough. I—”
“I’m not finished.” I’m shaking worse now, and it’s fine. “It’s the same play they ran on me at eighteen. And you’re running it right now, right here.” A breath. “So I’m not taking it back, and if you go after Rowan, now everyone in this room knows why.”
He doesn’t lean in, and he doesn’t raise his voice. “You’ve made this a great deal harder than it needed to be,” he says.
I hold his eyes. “Good.”
Somewhere behind me, a woman with a Halden lanyard is talking fast into her phone. Every face in the room is turned our way now, and Patrick Cross is standing in the middle of it with nowhere to put his hands, learning what I already know about rooms like this.
They remember.