Chapter 5 #2
She’d seen him. He knew because she’d turned, and her face had opened.
For one unguarded second, before she’d had time to rebuild her composure, her face had cracked open like a door flung wide, and everything she’d been holding back for four days had been right there on the surface.
The hurt. The disbelief. The betrayal so total it didn’t resemble anger. It resembled grief.
Then Reid’s hand had closed around her elbow, and she’d turned away.
Reid. Julian knew the name because the man had introduced himself to the school board rep.
Reid Jamieson. Senator Jamieson’s grandson.
Twenty-one years old with a handshake that said old money and a face that said good breeding, and he was standing next to Katy at the punch table now, talking to her in a low voice, and his hand was still on her elbow.
Julian observed them from across the room and felt acid spread through his chest.
“I’m going to get some water.” He pulled his arm free of Dionne’s grip and crossed the gymnasium floor and walked past the DJ booth and the photo backdrop and the chocolate fountain and stopped at the punch table, where Reid Jamieson was standing with Katy Gates, who regarded Julian with an expression so blank it made the nothing he’d worn at Table Three seem amateur.
She turned and walked away without a word. Into the crowd. Gone.
Reid followed her exit, then turned to Julian with the assessing calm of a man who’d been raised in politics and knew how to read a room.
“Julian Ventura,” Reid said pleasantly. “I recognize you from Haven.”
“Reid Jamieson.” He didn’t know what he was doing here. He didn’t know why his feet had carried him across the room to a man he’d never met who’d been touching Katy’s elbow. “Chaperoning?”
“My grandfather’s idea. He thinks community involvement builds character.” Reid picked up a cup of punch, examined it, set it back down. “How do you know Katy?”
“Through her sister.”
“Right. Dionne.” Reid’s tone was easy, conversational, the tone of a man who had no idea he was holding a grenade.
“Nice woman. I met her at Haven a few times. She’s the one who told me Katy worked there, actually.
I asked about her after I spotted her on the terrace. ” He paused. “She seemed lonely.”
“What do you mean?”
“Katy. She ate lunch alone every day in the staff area. I’d catch her from the patio.
She never talked to the other servers. Dionne mentioned once that she was worried about it, said Katy had trouble making friends, that she kept to herself.
” Reid shrugged. “Which is why I was surprised when Dionne also said Katy was stirring up drama with the staff. Seemed like two different people.”
The gymnasium noise faded. The bass, the laughter, the fog machine, all of it receded until there was only Reid’s voice, casual and unhurried, delivering words that hit Julian like blows.
“When did Dionne say that?” Julian heard his own voice from a distance.
“A few weeks back? She called me about a Haven fundraiser and mentioned it in passing. About Katy bragging to coworkers about a member, causing problems.” Reid tilted his head.
“Didn’t line up with the girl I’d been observing eat PB&J by herself every afternoon.
But I figured I didn’t know the whole story. ”
She never talked to the other servers.
She ate lunch alone every day.
Katy bragging to coworkers.
The two narratives sat side by side in Julian’s skull, and the gap between them was a chasm, and at the bottom of the chasm was a question he hadn’t allowed himself to ask because asking it meant dismantling everything he’d built on top of it.
What if Dionne was lying?
His vision narrowed. The gymnasium, the disco balls, the scattered light, all of it compressed into a single point: the spot on the dance floor where Katy had been standing when she’d turned and her face had opened with grief.
“Excuse me,” he said.
He turned from the punch table and scanned the room. The dance floor. The photo booth. The cluster of sequined girls, the wrestling-hold boys, the fog machine pumping its chemical sweetness into the heavy air. The green dress. The red hair.
She wasn’t there.
He moved through the crowd. Past the DJ, past the chaperone station, past Dionne, who called his name and he didn’t stop. Through the gymnasium, corner to corner, table to table. The hallway. The lobby. The parking lot door.
The parking lot was half-empty. A minivan. A pickup truck. A space where a car had been, recently, the asphalt still warm from the engine.
She was gone.
Reid Jamieson was leaning against a pillar near the gymnasium entrance when Julian came back inside. The senator’s grandson assessed him with an expression that was polite on the surface and iron underneath.
“She left,” Reid confirmed.
“Where?”
“Somewhere you’re not.” Reid straightened.
He wasn’t hostile. He was simply a wall.
Calm, immovable, backed by connections that could make a person vanish into the infrastructure of a political family and never surface again.
“She’s had a rough night, and I don’t think she needs more of whatever put that expression on her face. ”
“You don’t know what—”
“I know enough.” Reid’s voice was quiet. Final. “I know she walked into this gym alone with her chin up and a twelve-dollar dress and more courage than anyone in this room, and then you walked in with her sister and she crumbled. I don’t need the details to know which side of this I’m on.”
Julian stood in the gymnasium doorway while the bass thumped and the disco balls scattered their cold light and the fog machine did its mindless work, and he contemplated the space where Katy Gates had been, and for the first time since the garden, since the grove, since the terrace where he’d called her love a fixation and let her walk away with her head high and her heart in ruins, he felt the full weight of what he’d done settle onto his chest.
Katy was...gone.
He stood there. The gymnasium throbbed around him.
Dionne appeared at his elbow, saying words, and he didn’t hear them.
He was taking in the empty dance floor and the scattered disco-ball light and the paper stars hanging from fishing line, and he was thinking about a girl in a green dress who had come to her own prom alone because the man she loved had told her she was nothing, and then that man had walked in with her sister, and she had still held her chin up, she had still not crumbled, she had still been Katy until the very last second, and now she was gone.
And he had done this.
All of it. Every piece. The cruelty and the cowardice and the monstrous choice to believe a lie because the truth required bravery he didn’t have.
He’d had the power to find her and keep her and he’d used it to push her away, and the man in the bathroom mirror, the one with his mother’s eyes, was not a warning anymore.
He was a reflection.