Prologue
“They’ll make you feel like you don’t belong,” Angela says over the rim of her collector’s tea set. One of the fine china ones from the fifties with little blue flowers. Her hand shakes as she brings the cup to her lips, a sign of her age that saddens me.
I bring my own cup up to my lips. Matching her pace. “Most men do.”
We sit at her small table in her solarium. Tea and pastries spread before us. It’s Monday and just like every Monday from the last year and a half we start our day at eleven with tea in her solarium.
I’ve grown to love this time with Angela, who felt like a long-lost aunt to me the moment I met her. Lucky for me, she took me under her wing.
She laughs but it’s more strained than usual. “These men, they aren’t just billionaires and boys with too much money they don’t know what to do with.” There’s a warning in her voice as she drops a cube of sugar in her tea. Again. It’s the fifth one.
Angela loves her sweets.
I’m making a face at her, I can feel it in the stretch across my cheeks. I try to relax my forehead, focus on one of the many hanging plants in her solarium. They’re green, I’ve always wondered how they stay so vibrant.
“What are you trying to say, Angela?” I reach across the table to take her frail hand. Gently, because her skin feels like papier-maché.
We all know she’s dying. The room smells like old roses wilting on the counter long after their expiration date. Too sweet and going to rot underneath.
I shouldn’t be able to smell that. People don’t smell dying. I always could. Sometimes I think it’s from sitting at my mother’s bedside as she faded away. A smell that I can’t pretend doesn’t exist.
Angela told me once she could smell death as well. I filed it away deep in my mind, the way I file most things she says I shouldn’t know, under Angela things, ask later. Or never.
She purses her aged lips together before her eyes cut to the door. Her bodyguard is standing where he always stands. Arms crossed, glaring at a wall like the wall did something to him. Angela calls him her surly Momoa.
She’s obsessed with all things sexy in Hollywood.
Except today his eyes keep creeping over to look at us. I’ve caught him three times now and it’s enough to make my own skin crawl.
“The Sanguine Agreement,” she whispers, her eyes on his stance before briefly looking to me. She doesn’t realize he keeps looking over at us.
“Pardon?” I match her tone. The solarium is the same temperature it was a minute ago. I am not. There’s just something about her tone that feels wrong. I set the teacup down with more care than the moment calls for, porcelain too loud against porcelain.
“The agreement, my sweet girl.” She squeezes my hand back. “When I’m gone, remember. No is a complete sentence.”
I want to laugh it off. File it away with the rest of the impossible things Angela says over tea. Instead, I hear myself agreeing because correcting a dying woman feels cruel.
“Of course.”
She sighs, knowing I’m just placating her. “When I’m gone,” she says again. “There will come a time when you look back at this moment and understand. A time when they will make you feel you have no other choice.” She squeezes my hand again. “You do. I’m proof of that choice.”
“No one will ever take my identity from me again,” I assure her.
All my life, my relationships ended before they ever had the chance to begin, except the one time.
The One time I thought I was in love. But I can tell my assurance isn’t enough because her head is already shaking no before the last word leaves my lips.
“The loss of the self,” she whispers so quietly I barely hear her. Her eyes dart to the corner before looking back at me. “Happens between moments you’ve convinced yourself are living. But life and love never come with strings attached.”
“Angela.” Her bodyguard is at her shoulder. He didn’t cross the room. He was at the door and then he was here and I didn’t track the in-between. Odd.
“I believe it’s time for your nap.”
I think the fuck not. “It’s the middle of our—”
“That’s alright, Hadley,” Angela says but she is looking at him, at her bodyguard hovering over us. “I could use a nap.”
She drops my hand and leans back, but not before patting my arm softly.
I stand up knowing when someone is dismissing me. Gather my purse, and I walk to the door of the solarium. At the threshold something stops me. A quiet pulse of knowing I don’t dare ignore and I look back.
Angela’s eyes are closed, now laying on her favorite napping couch. She looks so damn small as her bodyguard hovers over her.
It’s just a nap, I tell myself. And I leave.
That was the last time I saw Angela Sanguine.
The last time anyone saw her alive.