Chapter 9
SIMON
The sound of sobbing coming from the kitchen—where I was headed to raid the fridge for orange juice, in the hopes that Theo’s mom was still buying the really good stuff—made me pause at the threshold.
It was a woman’s voice. Not Theo’s mom, who’d grabbed him the moment we’d come back to the house and whisked him away somewhere. Younger.
I peeked around the doorframe to see Delilah sitting alone at the table, head resting on her arms, which were folded on top of an assortment of papers spread over nearly the whole surface, sobbing like she’d had her heart broken.
Theo would have told me this wasn’t my problem. That I didn’t have to fix everything, always.
Theo, for better or worse, was not here.
“Hey,” I said as I approached the table approximately the same way I would have approached an injured wild animal that might have had rabies.
Delilah froze, the sobbing cutting off instantly. She lifted her head just far enough to peek at me.
For a moment, we looked at each other as though we were both likely to bite.
One of us was going to have to be brave, and I wasn’t the one who’d been crying.
“Do you want an orange juice?” I asked. I had half a memory of Delilah taking the last of it one morning over breakfast. Tastes changed, but it was as good an opening line as I could think of.
Delilah sat up, her gaze locked on my face.
Her mascara was shockingly intact, barely smudged from the crying.
I’d have to ask her later what brand she used and get some for Ellie, who’d complained to me more than once that waterproof mascara was a lie and she couldn’t ever go on dates to movies that might make her cry because of it.
“Sure.” She sniffed.
I nodded and headed for the fridge, finding exactly the fancy orange juice I’d been hoping for.
“Can, umm,” Delilah spoke up from the table, sniffing again. “Can you cut it with soda water? There’s a dispenser on the front of the fridge.”
“Sure,” I said. “Half and half?”
She nodded. I kept half an eye on her as I poured for both of us, pausing a second and then deciding to cut my own juice the same way. Maybe it’d be disgusting, maybe she was onto something. Either way, I’d learn something new.
“Thank you,” Delilah said in a tiny, childlike voice as I set her juice down in the only clear three-inch square on the whole table. She’d sat up completely straight now and was wiping tears away from her lashline with a perilously sharp stiletto nail.
I looked over the papers on the table—spreadsheets of names and details, a stack of silver-edged cards scattered all over the place, catering lists…
Wedding stuff.
“Did Corey leave you to do all this alone?” I asked. It looked like a whole lot of work. I could believe it of him. Asshole.
“No,” Delilah sniffed. “I… Mom was taking over, and I wanted… this is my wedding. I only get one.”
Part of me sincerely doubted that. Not that I planned on saying so.
Who knew? Maybe it’d last. Maybe I was wrong.
“And I wanted to do it because everyone thinks I’m stupid,” Delilah continued, pitch rising.
“They see the boobs and the hair and the nails and they don’t take me seriously, but I am smart.
I’m just as smart as Theo and Madelaine.
I can be pretty and smart at the same time.
Corey thinks I’m smart. He’s going to help me go to college and be something other than just pretty.
I can do this. I’m smart enough for this. ”
Her voice was ragged by the time she stopped, swallowing thickly. I nudged her juice a quarter-inch closer. She grabbed it, tilted her head back, and drank the whole glass without pause, which was an incredible feat of breath control.
I traded her glass for mine when she put it down and she accepted that one, too, but only sipped it. There were tears glistening along her lashes again.
I pulled out the chair beside her and sat down.
“What are you going to college for?” I asked. “I mean, what do you want to study?”
Delilah looked at me warily. That was fair. The last time we’d talked, she’d called me Theo’s dork boyfriend he isn’t even fucking. You could say our relationship wasn’t the closest.
“You can’t laugh at me,” she said, chewing on her lower lip.
“I won’t,” I promised, raising my hands in submission. “I wouldn’t.”
She had no particular reason to know that about me—or even believe me—but I hoped she would. I hated to see anyone upset like this. Even people who were knowingly and intentionally marrying my best friend’s ex who broke his heart. And forcing him to attend the wedding.
“I want to be a vet,” she said. “For, umm. Horses.”
That… took me by surprise.
Delilah had always seemed happy enough playing the part of glamorous heiress. I had no idea how smart or studious she might have been, although it was occurring to me that I might’ve made some ugly assumptions.
She’d never done me any favors or anything—except the dubious one of having this wedding, which had ended in me almost having Theo, for a weekend. I wasn’t sure yet whether that counted as a favor or not.
“Wow.” I blinked at her. “That’s, uh—”
“I can do it,” she interrupted. “I had the grades coming out of high school.”
Huh. Well. Madelaine and Theo were smart. There wasn’t any particular reason Delilah shouldn’t have been.
I’d just… yeah. The boobs, the nails, the hair. I’d assumed, like everyone else did.
The thought sat uncomfortably in my guts. It wasn’t as though I’d done her any harm, and I’d told Theo earlier that it mattered what he did, not what he thought. All the same. It’d been an unfair thought.
“Why didn’t you?” I asked. That was absolutely none of my business, but we seemed to be having a heart-to-heart now.
Delilah glanced in a direction that gave everything away—toward her mom’s room.
“Oh.”
She sniffed again, sipping the juice that had once been mine. “This has soda water in it?”
I shrugged. “Thought you might’ve been onto something. Figured I ought to try it before deciding it wasn’t for me.”
“It’s good,” Delilah said, still defensive.
I’d never seen her like this. From my perspective, she’d been…
Well…
A not very nice word starting with B that I wasn’t going to apply to her now that we were all adults and I’d grown and changed and worked on not even thinking for years. Unpleasant, I settled on, but there was more to it than that. She’d always seemed so confident.
But then, if you didn’t know his tells, so did Theo. I was, as far as I knew, the only one who ever saw him break down under pressure. In private.
It made sense that might’ve been a family trait. Theo had said before that he couldn’t afford to show weakness in front of his mother.
If I called my mom right now and sobbed down the phone to her, she’d be over here as fast as dad could drive her to give me a hug and make me chamomile tea and cinnamon sugar toast.
“I’ll try it later,” I promised. “Horses, though?”
Delilah looked at me again. Still wary, but starting to thaw.
“I like horses,” she said. “You’re going to make fun of me—”
“I’m not,” I interrupted, raising my hands in surrender again. “I’m not. I’m just terrified of horses, so from my perspective you’re currently the bravest person in the world.”
“Really?”
“Really,” I said, honestly. I wasn’t making any of this up. “A Shetland pony bit me at a petting zoo when I was six. Never got over it, I guess. Do you… ride?”
Theo didn’t, and I didn’t think Madelaine did. I hadn’t thought of them as a horse family, particularly.
“I did for a while, when I was little,” Delilah said. “We—swear you won’t tell my mother this?”
I smiled wryly. “You know how we feel about each other.”
Delilah returned the smile, which felt like a good sign.
“We’re moving to a ranch. Me and Corey. He grew up on one, he likes horses,” she said, leaning close and keeping her voice low.
That was brand new information. He’d never mentioned them to me—although it wasn’t as though we were best friends.
The height of my intimate knowledge of him was that I knew he took his coffee with black, like a civilized person, but with a shot of sugar-free vanilla syrup.
I’d tried it once out of curiosity and been pleasantly surprised but not moved to change my own order.
It occurred belatedly to me that a man from Texas who came from money probably couldn’t easily avoid being around horses. I’d always assumed the cowboy act was just that—an act, a character he was playing because he thought it was charming. Because other people thought it was charming, even.
Theo had thought it was charming.
“In Texas,” Delilah continued at little more than a whisper, glancing around as though she was afraid she’d be overheard. In Texas. About as far from New York as you could get without leaving the country.
I was beginning to put together a picture that made my heart hurt.
“Then college,” she added with dignified determination.
I’d never seen Delilah so vulnerable before. Not that we’d seen all that much of each other, but from what I had seen, and what Theo had told me—all of which I believed, since he had no reason to lie—she seemed like a completely different person right now.
“That takes guts,” I said. I almost added invite me to graduation. Right now, I wanted to see Delilah cross that stage in the stupid robe and hat. Because she so clearly wanted it.
“I’m not brave,” she continued, looking down at her hands in her lap. “Corey’s brave for me, though. I know Theo thinks I’m doing this to spite him, but I’m not. I’m doing it for me.”
I’d definitely thought spite was part of the motivation, but I didn’t anymore. This was too honest.
The fact that I couldn’t see the appeal of Corey—aside from the good looks—didn’t mean there was nothing to see in him.
Hell, maybe he loved Delilah. Maybe Theo and I had both gotten this all wrong.
“And I just want my wedding to be a nice day,” she went on. “You would not believe what I had to talk Mom down from. Be grateful Theo didn’t drag you to the French Riviera.”
“Isn’t that a little overdone?” I asked. As always, I didn’t actually have any idea about these things.
Delilah shrugged. “It’s been overdone long enough to be fashionable again. Especially if it was a Hargrave wedding.”
She straightened a little as she said that, a hint of pride squaring her shoulders.
“Okay.” I gestured at the papers covering the table. “So all this is…?”
“Seating charts, menus, guest preferences and relationships and stuff. There are more people coming for the actual wedding,” she said.
“I have to make sure they’re all seated in places where they won’t start fights and none of them are served anything they’re allergic to or don’t eat.
Then I have to write all these place cards.
” She waved at the silver-edged cards I’d noticed earlier. “I don’t know where to start.”
I looked at the papers, then at Delilah, then at the papers again.
I sighed. Unfortunately for me, she had the same eyes as her brother, and I’d never been able to resist Theo. No force on Earth could have stopped me saying the next thing that came out of my mouth.
“Lucky for you, I’m an archivist.”