Chapter 2
MY TAXI PULLED UP to a busy corner on Lexington Avenue. Nestled in between various skyscrapers sat Afterlife, the swanky cocktail lounge that Agnes and Mara, always ones to seek out the newest spots, had chosen to meet at.
Through its sparkling clean windows, I spotted the warm twinkle of flickering candles, beckoning me inside. After scanning the menu on the way over, I’d settled on getting a glass of pinot noir and calling it a night. Otherwise, I’d end up spending a small fortune.
Of course, Agnes’s career as a successful model and Mara’s work as a young, hungry lawyer made it so that a place like Afterlife was well within their budget.
For me, not quite so much. While my yearly income wasn’t anything to scoff at—at least double what my parents made growing up—I somehow found myself consistently living paycheck to paycheck.
I paid the fare and stepped out onto the lively street. Glancing about as the chilly city air swirled around me, I caught a glimpse of the Chrysler Building, radiant and glowing, just up the avenue.
The door to Afterlife flew open and out poured an intriguing mixture of jazz and electronic music, the distinct scent of Angostura bitters, and a throng of young women in designer dresses and red-bottomed high heels, followed by a crew of finance guys doused in their finest colognes.
I dodged them as they romped past me, caught the door before it closed, and scuttled inside.
I blinked, my vision slowly but surely adjusting to the remarkably low ambient lighting, the kind of lighting meant to make anyone cast in its forgiving, shadowy guise ten times more beautiful and mysterious.
A round, elaborate bar stood in the middle of the room, stocked only with top-shelf spirits.
A Renaissance-inspired mural stretched across the ceiling.
Large, deliberately worn vintage French area rugs covered the dark wood floors.
Rich, luxurious red velvet booths lined the walls, each complete with a small antique chandelier dangling from above.
I couldn’t help but notice the bartenders dashing around whose uniforms bore a striking resemblance to my own getup.
I glanced down at my admittedly simple outfit, suddenly self-conscious and wishing I’d brought a change of trendy clothes to work with me.
Make no mistake—my Ralph Lauren blouse and Burberry trench coat had made quite the dent in my credit card bill.
But they still weren’t exactly suited to an establishment like this one.
A waitress waltzed past me, holding a tray full of stunning cocktails and small bites that looked more like pieces of art than food and beverages.
Out of the corner of my eye, I caught Agnes’s hand waving me over to their booth toward the back. I weaved my way through the crowd, ducking past various groups of posh folks.
“There you are!” Agnes exclaimed. She shimmied out, giving me a tight hug that left a cloud of Gucci Flora hanging in the air. Mara’s embrace quickly followed.
“We already ordered a drink for you.” Mara spoke at a volume just above normal to compete with the music. She gestured to a beautiful, shimmery pink beverage sitting on the table.
“Oh, you shouldn’t have,” I said, flashing a quick smile as I sat down.
There go twenty dollars, I thought. But then again, you’re having fun.
The girls were dressed to the nines, as usual. Agnes wore a slinky silver sequined tank top that highlighted her chin-length, icy blond hair, along with fitted leather pants; Mara sported a short crimson silk dress that hugged her curves just so, her ebony hair pulled back into a sleek, low bun.
The girls held up their frosty glasses and grinned, waiting. I plucked up my own, and we cheered one another and took a sip.
“What’s in this thing?” I asked, swallowing.
“Not sure,” Agnes said. “I just asked for something extra special to match a very special occasion.” She eyed Mara.
“All right, so,” Mara said in her always serious, melodious voice, “I have something very important to report to you, Jane.”
Agnes hid a smile, clearly bursting with excitement. I tilted my head to the side, curious and amused. “You have my attention.”
Without another word, Mara held up her left hand. Upon her fourth finger sat a sparkling, magnificent oval sapphire ring, complete with a halo of smaller diamonds surrounding it, so massive that it practically covered her entire knuckle.
My stomach dropped. My breath went shallow.
“It—it’s . . .” At a loss for words, I blinked a few times. And with each one, Mara’s exquisite ring shone brighter.
I knew I was supposed to be happy for her. I wanted to be happy for her. Truly, I did. Mara and Conrad, the ultimate power couple, had been together for a few years now. She deserved this.
But I couldn’t ignore the strange flash of envy that had just surged through my veins. Here was Mara, engaged to be married to a top lawyer, and Agnes, dating Roman, a respected drummer, for five years, and me—still very single at twenty-nine.
“It’s beautiful. I’m so happy for you,” I finally said, wondering if she’d believe me. Especially given that I wasn’t sure if I believed me.
“Doesn’t it look just like Princess Di’s?!” Agnes wailed.
She was right. It did.
“What I know for sure,” Mara said, “is that I’m not doing a mermaid silhouette. I don’t have the right hips for it.”
Out of the corner of my eye, I spotted a flash of warm blond hair that was the exact shade of—
That couldn’t be him . . . could it? The guy who’d caught my attention turned his face, and my blood flow slowly resumed.
No. It wasn’t him.
All these years later, I still stopped dead like a deer in headlights at the mere sight of a guy who, upon further inspection, only sort of resembled Noah Elliot.
The boy I’d crushed on all throughout high school.
The boy whose memory somehow got on the plane with me to New York and continued to follow me around. Ten years later.
“Jane?” Mara’s voice called to me. “What do you think?”
I snapped my eyes back to the girls, who were looking at me expectantly. “Sorry, I—what?”
“Forest green is too last year, right? For the palette?” Mara asked.
“It’s just that it doesn’t feel right for a wedding in Italy,” Agnes piped in. “Plus it’s overdone.”
“Uh, yeah. I agree. No forest green.”
They both nodded, satisfied. My attention drifted in and out as Mara continued to lay out her ideas, but I caught that she was thinking of Lake Como in September of next year. Agnes and I were, of course, set to be bridesmaids.
What were the chances I’d be bringing a plus one to that wedding, eleven months out?
The last year or so had been somewhat stagnant in the romantic department for me. After a series of dates that hadn’t led anywhere, I’d decided to take a breather.
I didn’t regret taking that time to focus on working on my novel, but I hadn’t considered how it would feel to be the only one of us without someone’s arm to hold on to.
That was how it had always been, though—being the odd one out. Agnes Abbott and Mara Sinclair had come from a different world than I had. One of opulence and status and affluence. The fact that we’d even become friends never ceased to amaze me.
It happened by chance that we had all enrolled in the same general education biology course, each one of us bored out of our minds and paired together for a project.
We ended up laughing more than we worked, which led to late-night Gilmore Girls binges and pizza runs, which led to Agnes and Mara, both native Manhattanites, taking me out on the town and introducing me to the city’s best-kept secrets and inviting me to their family’s summer homes in the Hamptons year after year, guiding me into a life I’d never known before.
In our senior year, they’d bestowed me with an honorary “New Yorker” title.
I’d thoroughly enjoyed integrating into their world—as much as I could, of course.
My humble, single-story home in Avila Falls was hardly comparable to Agnes’s family’s posh apartment that overlooked Central Park’s southern border.
Nor did it stand a chance next to the breathtaking brownstone on the Upper East Side that Mara grew up in.
My parents’ professions as a nurse and a grocery store manager didn’t hold a candle to Agnes’s hedge fund manager dad and socialite mom, or Mara’s Ivy League law professor father and lawyer mother.
Their lives were undeniably enviable and important, glamorous and impressive.
Upon our first meeting, mine wasn’t. My life was normal.
Ordinary at best and forgettable at worst. The perks of being Jane Caldwell didn’t include modeling contracts and getting a good word put in at a law firm.
The best it could afford me was discounts at Dawson’s Market.
That is, until Agnes’s dad introduced me to the head of Carmichael at one of the Abbotts’ yearly holiday bashes.
Fast forward a month later, and I’d landed a job freelancing for the publisher of my dreams.
Underneath the mask I’d meticulously crafted in the decade since I’d left Colorado—the one that looked to the world like a sleek, professional, capable woman—I couldn’t shake the feeling that I was the commoner who’d somehow befriended the princesses.
I did my best to hide how I felt from Agnes and Mara, keeping information about my hometown and my family to a minimum. They didn’t know much about my old life.
There were times when my background was much more easily ignored, times when it truly felt as though I belonged in the world I’d plunged into after moving to New York.
And then there were times when my commonness crept up on me like a dormant illness.
Times when I was confronted with what I so desperately didn’t want to be true—that no matter how much I had struggled to reinvent myself after getting out of Avila Falls, to be a different Jane Caldwell than the one who had gotten on a plane over a decade ago and never looked back, I wasn’t born an Abbott or a Sinclair.
Mara’s ring was just the latest reminder of that.
“All right, Jane, enough about me.” Mara’s voice drew me out of my thoughts. She peered at me, squinting her dark eyes. “I want to know: What are you doing tomorrow night?”
I disguised my sigh as a chuckle, knowing exactly where this was headed—the same place it was always headed whenever Mara or Agnes inquired about my schedule with that twinkle in their eyes.
“I’ve got a date with Captain Wentworth,” I quipped.
“With who?” Agnes giggled.
Mara interrupted before I could offer Agnes an explanation, even though I’d gifted Agnes a copy of Jane Austen’s Persuasion last year. “Incorrect,” she declared. “You’ve got a date with Conrad’s friend, Logan.”
“Ooh,” Agnes interjected, flashing her eyebrows up and down enthusiastically.
It had been a few months since the last date the girls had set me up on, the latest in a now years-long string of handsome suitors that a decade prior would have been completely out of my league—but apparently not since my “taking off the nerdy glasses” transformation.
Some of them I had dated for a time, and others had remained one-offs.
What they all had in common, though, was that they ran in Abbott and Sinclair circles.
They were the kind of men who dated women who planned weddings in Italy.
Men who took their date to restaurants that didn’t bother putting the prices on the menu.
“Logan, huh?” I repeated, twirling my straw.
“Oh, Jane, he’s really cute,” Agnes said.
“Not to mention, he’s an actor,” Mara added. “He’s in that show, The Unforgivables.”
My jaw dropped. “Wait, you mean—” I started.
“Yes, Logan Peters,” Mara said with a victorious flash of her brows.
Logan Peters was a semi-known name, having started as a child actor on a Disney show.
After a few guest spots on Law & Order and the like, he’d gotten a heftier role in a fun, overdramatic, pulpy television series about a group of college kids with a sinister secret to keep hidden.
Oh, and he was easy on the eyes. But was that enough?
“What am I going to have in common with an actor?” I protested.
“Are you kidding?” Mara said. “He’s perfect for you.”
“How so?”
Agnes jumped in. “He’s cool, creative, knows a ton of people—”
“Plus, I had Conrad show him your picture, and he insisted on meeting you,” Mara added.
Really? Me? My heart fluttered at the thought of sitting across from Logan Peters—a feeling I hadn’t experienced in some time.
Mara smiled. “You guys make so much sense together.” If she saw that much potential, maybe I should too. Images of a ring like Mara’s sitting on my own finger in two years’ time flashed through my mind.
I took pride in the life I’d built for myself in New York. But I’d be lying if I said I didn’t feel that a puzzle piece was still missing. I wanted someone to share the life I’d created with.
Maybe this would be the date that changed everything.