Chapter 37
“Tea, anyone?” Romeo asked the small group of guests made up of seven teenage geniuses and their guardians, four university professors, a librarian for the Vatican, and a rocket scientist named Dudley.
They were all huddled up in the dining room, having been instructed to stay here while the broken glass in the drawing room was being cleared. Their cage seemed to be getting smaller and smaller.
Romeo didn’t mind this much, because the dining room was connected to the pantry, and the pantry had a kettle, tea, and cookies. Romeo may not have been excellent at a lot of things, but he was pretty decent at brewing a good mug of tea and presenting it to people in times of crisis.
Most of the guests either ignored his offering or turned it down—even Perdita, who was sitting at the head of the table, refused his drink, much to his dismay.
Then again, she looked more preoccupied with the fact that Mr. Philips and his son were seated next to her.
There had been an awkward tension when he’d spoken to them.
Or maybe the awkward tension he was sensing was between himself and his sister. It felt like she’d been avoiding him.
“I’ll have a cup, thanks, Romeo!” Anwar said from his position on the dining room’s large bay window seat, looking up briefly from the cookbook he seemed to be reading.
“I’ll have a cup too,” Evie suddenly chimed in, strolling through one of the doors that led into the kitchen.
“Oh, hi,” Romeo said, eyebrows raised in surprise. “Where’ve you been?” He hadn’t seen Evie since the garden, when she’d revealed she was investigating his father’s murder.
“I’ve been here, there, and everywhere,” Evie said with a smile. “Was in the foyer for a bit and then the drawing room, but I was mostly in the kitchen with my mom.”
“You were? I was looking all over the place for you before. You seemed to have … disappeared.”
“Why were you looking for me?” Evie questioned, taking a seat on the bay window next to Anwar.
“I, uh … wanted to speak to you after the whole thing in the gardens earlier …” He had been nervous that she’d overheard the wrong thing and thought ill of his sister and wanted to set the record straight.
At least with Anwar, Romeo figured that since he seemed to know Bilal pretty well, he might care enough to not spread their family secrets—or so he hoped.
He wanted to make sure Evie wouldn’t say anything either.
“Well, here I am,” Evie said, gesturing at herself. “What did you want to tell me?”
Romeo glanced around at the other guests nearby and decided it might be best to have that conversation elsewhere, away from prying ears, suspecting glances, and police uniforms. He needed to talk to her in private.
“When they finish with the mess in the drawing room, I’ll tell you then,” Romeo said.
“Sounds mysterious,” Evie said with an unnerving smile. Her smile always disarmed him. “I only saw the aftermath of the drawing room. What happened in there?” Evie asked.
“Octavius happened. It’s a weird story that I don’t think I fully understand just yet … but what I can tell you is that it involves a horse,” Romeo said.
Evie’s eyebrows shot up in interest. She really wasn’t there, then, Romeo thought. Was she really with her mom at the time?
“Is Octavius okay?” Anwar asked.
Romeo genuinely didn’t know. “He’s upstairs, I think with Fola.
He’ll be fine, I’m sure.” He tried to mask the worry in his voice even though there was so much to worry about.
“But anyway, I’ll go and grab your drinks.
Be right back,” he said. Then he rushed off into the pantry room, grateful to feel needed and to have something else to focus on.
“What are you working on next?” Evie asked Anwar, as Romeo returned with their tea.
“Honestly? Nothing,” Anwar said. “I have no new ideas, and a part of me is scared that I’ll never come up with another good idea again, or that it’ll take years before I do.
But the other part of me remembers that I’m eighteen.
It won’t be the end of the world if the next thing I think of comes in ten years or even twenty. ” Anwar finished with a shrug.
Romeo placed the mugs down on the ottoman in front of the window and pulled one of the dining room chairs forward to sit on. “What are you guys talking about?” he asked.
“I was having an existential crisis over my career, and Evie here was being nice and listening to my ramblings,” Anwar said.
“Actually I was telling Anwar how much I love his books and would literally read his grocery lists,” Evie said.
“My agent would be very happy to hear that. She suggested I change lanes, try to write in a new genre, like a detective story or a murder mystery.”
“Me and Romeo used to love watching detective shows together,” Evie said. Romeo was a little surprised she remembered that. “What was that true crime series we used to rewatch all of the time? The one with the lawyer that was also a party clown?”
“The Clown’s Court?” Romeo said.
“Yes, that!” Evie turned to Anwar. “Well, if you do decide to write a detective book, Romeo and I would be very happy to be your research experts.”
“I think after today I’d probably like to avoid writing anything with crime or murder,” Anwar said with a smile.
“What about a romance?” Evie said. “Those are usually nice and tragedy-
free.”
Anwar winced. “I think I’m the last person who should be writing about romance right now, with my own love life so tragically screwed up,” he said.
Romeo watched as Anwar couldn’t help but look up in the direction of where Bilal was—just outside of the archway in that hall that led into the dining room.
Evie followed his gaze, raising an eyebrow when she saw who he was gazing longingly at like a lovesick puppy. “Are you dating Bilal Button or something?”
Anwar didn’t answer at first, just continued frowning in the general direction of Romeo’s eldest brother, who was too busy brooding alone to notice. He shrugged, tearing his eyes away from Bilal. “I don’t know anymore.”
“You don’t know? How is that possible?” Evie asked in a way that might have sounded judgmental in any other context, but with prodigies every question was a genuine inquisition.
“I don’t know because Bilal never speaks to anyone about anything.
He’s a really closed-off person and he almost never discusses his feelings.
It’s one of the reasons we broke up in the first place.
In the beginning we used to talk a lot more, but toward the end he’d completely closed himself off and would never tell me his true feelings on anything.
Last night was the first we’d even spoken since March, and now so much has happened in the last day and everything feels so strange and uncertain …
” Anwar’s voice trailed off as he ran his fingers through his curly black hair in frustration.
“I don’t know. What would you do if you had an ex-boyfriend who you were certain hated you, but then you happened to hook up with out of the blue after months and months of silence? ”
Romeo wasn’t sure that this question was for him since this was clearly about his brother’s sex life, but he cleared his throat and tried to give an answer anyway. “I would, uhm, just go and ask.”
Anwar raised an eyebrow. “Ask what, exactly?”
“I’d ask the person what we meant to each other, rather than fermenting in my own conspiracies and theories about the situation.
I feel like we create a lot of messed-up scenarios that are nothing like the reality of things in our head,” Romeo said.
“I think Bilal would probably respond well to you just telling the truth.”
Anwar looked pensively at the ground.
“Well, I don’t really know Bilal that well, even though we kind of grew up in the same space, so I am admittedly not the best person to answer this,” Evie said.
“But I remember how intense Bilal used to be about fencing; it used to take precedence over everything in his life. He would eat, sleep, and breathe fencing. I’m kind of surprised Bilal even had time for a relationship. ”
“You don’t have to tell me twice about that. I am very used to coming second to his first love,” Anwar muttered bitterly.
“In defense of my brother, he’s only like that because it’s how we were raised. It’s messed up, but we were raised to be machines, and so machines we became,” Romeo said, which was the sanitized way of describing it.
What he didn’t mention was how they were forced to become machines.
He didn’t go into the specifics of the Button Method in all its gory detail.
How he and his siblings would spend eighteen hours a day being rigorously trained in their chosen specialty.
Their father would hire the very best in their fields of study from all over the world and would have them locked in a laboratory, trained and trained like they were robots or some artificial intelligence program instead of children.
Romeo remembered those grueling years he was seated in front of a typewriter in a room with some Ivy League English professor who’d yell at him for hours about his spelling mistakes, grammatical errors, and general lack of perception.
He was meant to be a writing prodigy, meant to have written several literary masterpieces by now, maybe a bestseller or two.
He was meant to be just like Anwar. But instead, he was a failure.
Romeo’s father had apparently “saved” him when he adopted Romeo, but Romeo couldn’t do the one thing that was expected of him.
There was so much effort put into all of them, and sometimes he felt guilty for even existing.
“Mr. Button trained me too. And my brother, Adam, he … took us both under his wing, made us both into so-called geniuses. In a way, I became a ballet machine because of him,” Evie said, her eyes unfocused and her voice wispy, like her mind was elsewhere.
Then she blinked and refocused her gaze on Anwar.
“I guess … if Bilal is like a machine, maybe he just needs you to tell him how you feel in the way a scientist might condition a computer.”
Anwar’s brows were drawn together. “So you’re saying I should lock him in a room and shout at him that he needs to learn to communicate and that I want us to be together?”
“That’s not exactly what I meant … no …,” Evie began, but Anwar was already up on his feet, his tea abandoned on a side table, a new determination settled onto his face.
“I’ll be back,” he said, and then strode right over to where Bilal was standing out in the hall. Bilal looked up in alarm as Anwar grabbed the arm of the fencer and dragged him away into the ether.
“I don’t think he’s coming back,” Romeo muttered.
Evie laughed. “I don’t think so either. Hopefully our advice was somewhat helpful. I’m no romance expert. Admittedly, I haven’t been in many romantic entanglements with boys or girls for that matter.”
“Neither have I … with girls, that is. I don’t have much interest in boys,” Romeo said, then quickly followed up with, “Not that there is any problem with liking both boys and girls … and everyone else.”
Evie only smiled at him.
“Anyway, what I mean to say is, I haven’t really had many options, with being homeschooled and all,” he finished, his face warmer than it was before.
“Same, though I did have a crush on this one girl in my ballet company. Nothing ever came of it and since I left Italy last year, nothing ever will,” Evie said.
Romeo blinked. Last year?
“I thought you’d just been promoted to the principal dancer?” he asked, confused.
Now Evie was looking at him strangely. “Did I say that?”
“I think so … You said my father helped you out with the promotion recently? Maybe I misunderstood or something,” he said, even though he knew he was definitely remembering correctly. The memory of the night before on the yacht flashed into his mind.
“I wanted to thank Mr. Button for helping me out in Italy. I had a really tough time the last couple of months and he stepped in with this complicated situation I was dealing with at the ballet company. He even helped me get promoted to principal dancer.”
Evie did say that.
“I’ve never been the principal ballerina. You probably did misunderstand,” Evie agreed. “I should go and check on my mom, see if she needs help. She’s making dinner for everyone. I’ll steal something for you if I can,” she said with a smile.
“Thanks,” Romeo said, but for the first time he did not return her smile.
Instead, he watched as Evie left the dining room, the ghost of her words both past and present echoing loudly in his brain. If she’d left Italy last year … where had she been this entire time if not with her ballet company?
An uncomfortable chill settled over his shoulders then.
Romeo kept looking at her, through her, like it was the first time he was really seeing Evie Gray.