The rest of the girls fill out the table to the end, Leighton placed somewhere in the middle.
Saint engages in conversation with Third immediately, like she’s determined to make this matter.
“What a day,” Saint says, smiling broadly. “Did you enjoy the race, sir?”
“It went better than I thought it would. You did well, Saint. I am impressed,” Third compliments.
“Thank you. My father taught me how to ride,” she says. “In the South of France, at a friend’s villa.”
“Oh? That wouldn’t be Villeneuve, would it?” Third asks. That must mean something to Saint, something good, because she straightens, leaning in and nodding.
I look down at the table grain.
“You didn’t want to sit with your father?” I ask Graham. Slowly, I look at him from the corner of my eye.
“He’d much rather speak to any one of you than me,” Graham says with a shrug. He steeples his fingers, balances his chin on the joined tips of his fingers. “You did well today.”
“Thanks. I don’t feel like it,” I say gruffly.
“Well, I do. That first jump was clean,” Graham says.
“I had a good teacher and a good mount. It wasn’t me at all,” I say. I look down at the plate. Salad to start. I pick at it, shredding kale to pieces with my fork. When I finally do take a bite after staring for a long moment, the raspberry vinaigrette explodes on my tongue. It’s delicious. It’s also hard to make myself swallow. Graham doesn’t say anything for a while, not even something smart-ass, and when I look over at him, he’s watching me try to chew. “What?”
“I… nothing. Nothing,” Graham says, shaking his head, sounding mesmerized by… something.
“I’m too tired to figure out what that ‘nothing’ is,” I sigh wearily, not asking again.
Across the table, Pierce looks like he’s falling in love with Penthesilea all over again. I frown at them. I don’t understand them at all, which is odd, because looking at them, in this context, they make perfect sense. They match, but it’s almost like… the shape of Penthesilea is different now.
“How was the Taxis Ditch?” Graham asks like he already knows my answer.
“Thank you for telling me,” I say, looking at him hard. I choke over the words “Thank you,” but I mean it. “I don’t know what I would’ve… I couldn’t… Reagan’s friend died in the Taxis Ditch, and she actually knew how to ride. I wouldn’t have…”
I trail off, the full force of what’s happened and almost happened finally hitting me.
Graham leans in and I know we’re too close for comfort. We look like we’re conspiring, but I can’t move away.
“I was not going to let you die, Adina,” he says firmly. “You aren’t built for this life, and I promise you, I’m not being self-righteous when I say that’s a good thing. You don’t want to be like us.”
Us. Penthesilea and Pierce are a united front, smiling at Esme like she hasn’t killed a girl. Jacqueline’s chatting with Hannah G like she didn’t have a gun trained on me an hour ago. Like I didn’t almost drown her. Saint sits next to me, talking numbers and figures like her shoulder isn’t swollen, like she didn’t dry pop a painkiller before she slipped into a tight dress. Maybe he’s right.
In my moment of dissociation, our salad is swapped out for the main course.
It looks delicious. Wood-smoked salmon, garlic-butter mushrooms, broccolini, and rosemary. Everything fresh, properly cooked by a team of chefs. It’s rich and decadent, the kind of food that I’m not used to, that I thought I could grow used to. But just the thought of eating any of it makes my stomach turn now. I push it around with my fork, cutting it into pieces to busy myself.
Graham leans over in his seat, his fingers brushing over the lace sleeve of my dress. I flinch and he immediately lifts his hands, showing them to me, demonstrating that he means no harm.
“Aren’t you going to eat?” he asks.
“I don’t like salmon.” Another lie.
“What do you like to eat, then?”
“The rich.” I glare, daring him to sneer.
Graham smiles, liplessly. “That’s fair.”
He’s not being fair, though. His kindness is unfair.
“If you’re not going to eat it, can I have it?” a voice interrupts.
I look across the table at Esme. She looks serious, unsmiling and unmocking, and it’s a large enough change that I hear Saint’s voice falter just the tiniest bit before she continues strong in her own conversation.
“I think I will eat it,” I say, only because I don’t want her to have it. I’d rather stuff myself to the point of vomiting than let Esme take something else from me.
Esme leans across the table, and with a sincerity I didn’t know she was capable of, she says, “Good. My mother always told me not to play with your food.” But then she smiles wide, too wide, the kind where if this were a nightmare, her mouth would split open to reveal a cavern. “That one… that one I’m still learning.”
CHAPTER 17
EIGHTEEN HOURS ISN’T ENOUGH TIME to recover from the aches and pains of the Ride and the chilliness of our lunch.
Eighteen hours is all we get.
The rest of the day is spent in and out of ice baths, nursing our wounds and looking over our shoulders even more, while eating dainty sandwiches and caviar for dinner. The rich taste of the chef-prepared meals isn’t wet and heavy in my belly anymore. When I realize that, midbite, everything begins to taste like ash.
Sleep doesn’t come easy either. The memories come at inconvenient times throughout the night. On the edge of sleep, suddenly terror wells from somewhere primal and I hear the anxious whinny of a horse or Jacqueline’s cries, and my heart rate rachets up so fast that I worry that the sound of it will wake Saint. And then I breathe through it, only for the moment to repeat itself, until exhaustion hits so absolutely that I pass out more than fall asleep.
The next morning, after breakfast, we’re all finally allowed to call home.
Waiting feels like another challenge, but one of the mind. Leighton summons us to her office with little rhyme or reason to the order. Reagan goes and returns shiny eyed. Esme’s next and returns with a dour look to her face. Saint excuses herself from a call. When it’s finally my turn, it’s the early afternoon and only Jacqueline is left, and she seems to take it personally as I leave the common room, already shuffling the lies I will tell to my mother on my tongue.
The phone in Leighton’s office is old-fashioned, but stylish and shiny, with a rotary made of brass. We don’t even have a landline at home.
“You’ll have twenty minutes of conversation,” Leighton instructs from behind her desk. She gives the appearance that she’s not paying attention, carefully reading some kind of scholarly article, but I know better.
I dial my mom’s cell. The steady clicks and shuffle as the rotary swings back into place feel ominous. When I lift the receiver to my ear, I can feel the ringing in my teeth. And then there’s a soft click.
“Hello?”
My mother’s voice makes my eyes sting and the knot in my chest loosen. She sounds confused, and I frown, wondering why, until I realize that she wouldn’t have the Remington number saved in her phone and I’m breathing heavily like a serial killer.