Chapter 3
Carol beelines for me, jaw tight, eyes locked in like a heat-seeking missile. It’s hard to take her seriously, though, when she’s got a canapé and a glass of chardonnay balanced in one hand like she’s storming the beaches of some cocktail party.
“I need to speak with you,” Carol says and bites into her appetizer.
I tilt my head, widening my eyes to feign innocence.
Me? Whatever about?
But Carol isn’t buying it. The heat in her cheeks is radiating righteous fury.
I start looking for a misdirect—a bit of cat and mouse to tug a little more at the seams of her composure. Not to mention give myself a second to pull my defenses together.
The bathroom will do nicely.
I slip behind a crowd of people and snake my way toward the bathroom, laughing into my hand. Once I’m through the door, I listen for the usual lamentations that bubble up in crowded bathrooms—aching feet and smeared lipstick. I exhale a sigh of relief when I realize the bathroom is quiet.
Then, I turn the corner—and freeze.
Tippy Schaeffer is standing in front of the bathroom mirror, angling her face as she freshens up her makeup. While I think Tippy and I are contemporaries, her exact vintage is a secret only her aesthetician knows.
But however old she is, she’s never worked a day in her life.
She’s an heiress to a statewide liquor store empire—her house is known in the neighborhood as Casa de Tequila.
Her husband, Shep, spends most of his time fine-tuning his backswing while they both live off of Tippy’s spirits-soaked trust fund.
Shep likes to tell people he trades commodities, but the jury’s out on whether or not he knows what that means.
I’m hoping to sneak past her, but she stops me.
“Este,” she says and the way the “s” in my name sluices out confirms that Tippy is…tipsy.
My smile is guarded. Tippy has a Ph.D. in petty, and she’s not very good at hiding the fact that she thinks she—and her husband, Shep—should have taken Fritz and Gianna’s mantle rather than Nora and I.
“Nice party,” she goes on. “Your husband was just telling Shep and me about his tech days in California.”
“Oh?” My shoulders lock at the mention of our West Coast past.
She nods and says, “Beau is a genius.”
Beau could sneeze and they’d call him a savant.
He thrives in any room, effortlessly slipping in and out of conversations, laughing in all the right places.
He’s good at it, and most people are so awed by the tech-titan persona they don’t even ask what he did out there.
As soon as they hear he was an engineer, they assume the work would be over their heads.
Sometimes I catch myself studying their faces, and I like seeing their eyes widen in wonder as they imagine Beau making our money materialize from the perfect combination of ones and zeros.
They’re all intrigued to uncover whether he’s an evil genius or a benevolent mastermind.
They definitely never ask what I did out in California or if I had some hand in amassing our fortune. Everyone’s quick to imagine Beau luring me into a marriage with his piles of cash.
There was a time when it could have been me, though. It could have been my money that funded our glamorous lives.
“A genius?” I laugh. “Oh, never tell him that.”
Not that he wouldn’t deserve the praise. People practically worshipped him in California. But we vowed to leave all that behind us when we moved.
“Please.” Tippy sniffs. “The rich men in this town don’t need me inflating their egos.
” The laugh that follows is a little too sharp, hinting at a deeper truth.
I wonder how often she is undercut or vilified because she is a wealthy woman.
I’ve seen the way eyes slide past her at parties, giving more weight to her choice of outfit than her influence or power.
A rich man is so much more logical with this crowd.
They probably don’t know where to place her sometimes, and these people like brands.
Something they can name and assign clear value to.
Tippy straightens up, righting her smile. “I promise to keep it between us.”
I move to the sink beside her and reapply my lipstick.
“Speaking of which.” She clears her throat. “Did I see you last night?”
Fuck.
A ribbon of white toilet paper rising in the sky and unspooling as it catches on Carol’s fence flares in my memory.
After adorning Carol’s lawn in Charmin, Polly and I saw Tippy slipping inside her house with someone who wasn’t her husband, and I can still hear her flirtatious laugh bubbling through the air.
Shep’s a tall, sandy blond. The open car door eclipsed whoever Tippy was with, but the person was notably shorter than Shep.
I had hurried Polly along, sparing us both a conversation about Tippy’s life choices.
Tippy has a reputation for dalliances—both the sneaky and the brazenly overt—and I can never tell if Shep knows and doesn’t care or if he’s too busy with his tee times and scotch tastings to realize Tippy’s antics.
Tippy and Shep have been married for nearly a decade, but her wandering eye never seems to slow down.
Sometimes I think racking up admirers is a kind of game to her.
At the mention that Tippy saw Polly and me out, I freeze and meet her eyes in the mirror. Her reflection is tight with unease.
“I don’t know what you mean, Tippy.”
Her mouth twitches. She’s not smiling. But she’s not not smiling either.
“I got a little carried away with—” Her fingers fumble with the cap of her lip gloss, and there’s a mismatch between her body language and her words. Despite her implied shame, her eyes are bright and eager for an audience. She doesn’t want to hide her secret. She wants to hand it to me.
But I don’t want it.
“I’m going to stop you there.” I put up a hand. “I’m not being coy. I really don’t want to know.”
Her brow arches, incredulous; turning down fresh gossip around here is a cardinal sin.
“Everyone is entitled to their secrets, Tippy.” My shrug is deliberate, casual, but I’m preparing to insist if I need to. “I don’t need to know yours.”
Her jaw is still slack when she says, “You don’t want to know who I was with?”
This feels like a trap.
Gossip isn’t sharing, and it’s not a game. It’s an arms race. Every secret demands another. And once I start stockpiling other people’s secrets, it’s only a matter of time before they begin hunting for mine. For the version of myself that I buried. The person I used to be.
She’s long gone now, replaced by a version of me who no longer measures her worth in achievements or promotions. This version is loved by the best guy in the world and finally safe from the things that once hurt her.
So I can’t think of information I’d want to know less than who Tippy Schaeffer was skirting around the neighborhood with.
“No,” I promise.
“Well, aren’t you an original.” She smiles—it’s an almost endearingly hopeful grin, and I get the feeling that even though she didn’t get to tell me her secret, she’s pleased. Because she got something even more rare: a glimpse of someone who will not sell her out for gossip or social status.
I’m not sure I feel solidarity, exactly. But I do feel something close. Pity, maybe. Or recognition.
Leaving Tippy to her makeup and her secrets, I reemerge in the dining room, cautiously scanning the crowd.
There’s no sign of Carol, but I spot Detective Travis Ardell, holding court with a few Racquet Club members near the window. Gemma breezes past him with a drink on her tray, and whatever he says to her as she brushes by earns him a tight smile.
At the bar, Ford McGinnis is swarmed by wide-eyed fanboys and golf groupies acting like he’s the second coming of Arnold Palmer.
Or Christ. Although it’s possible Jesus and Arnold Palmer are one and the same here.
Celebrity sightings around Winter Park aren’t unheard of. This is the kind of place where you could run into some NBA player’s wife at Trader Joe’s, or spot a former boy band member on the Pilates reformer next to you. No one’s ever heard of Winter Park, and yet somehow everyone shows up here.
Gemma reaches Ford and hands off the drink she was carrying, stopping long enough to make him laugh. And unlike the drooling crowd, she manages to play it cool.
A passing onlooker notices Gemma and Ford talking and whispers, “I don’t think I’ve ever seen someone try so hard to pull a Nora.”
My head swivels around, a flash of protectiveness flaring for both Gemma and Nora. I scan the crowd, searching for the source of the snide comment. But they’ve already vanished. I barely have a second to look before I turn right into Nora and Autumn, the country club set’s beloved party planner.
Autumn’s brows knit, still bristling from the jab.
Nora’s making a face to object, too. “Why are they saying ‘pulling a Nora’ like it’s some party trick? I didn’t ‘pull’ anything. I met a guy and fell in love. And then, may I remind everyone, he died. Some party trick.”
Autumn and I both open our mouths, but Nora stops us. “It’s fine. I’m fine. But nobody’s pulling a Nora. That’s not a thing.”
Pacified by Nora’s reassurances, Autumn slips back into her hostess persona.
“You two look beautiful. Are you having fun? Did you try the signature cocktail?” Before we can respond, she sidles up to me and drops her voice to a whisper.
“Hey. So do you know of a reason why Carol Parker would be looking for you? Because I just bumped into her and—wow. She is furious.”
I fake a frown and try not to laugh, feeling like I might finally have the strength to settle the matter of my prank with Carol.
“What’s going on?” Nora asks, looking between Autumn and me.
“Este.” Autumn somehow manages to sound both cheerful and exasperated. “I don’t know what this is about, but I am going to tell you the same thing I told Carol: You two cannot fight at my party.”