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“No, that’s the problem.”

“Said no girl ever.” She rolls her eyes. “Did you not like him?”

“I liked him. He was smart, well-spoken, a bit posh, but I’m used to posh guys. And he was good-looking, I suppose, in a British upper-class type of way, and clearly well-brought-up, with good manners.”

“But?”

It takes me a moment to spit out the truth. I evade Alice’s eyes, looking at the flowers, the gilded mirror, the floor lamps—anything but her.

Dropping my eyes, I mutter against the rim of my glass.

“I didn’t want him.”

Alice’s eyes rest on me heavily, but she doesn’t say anything.

“I think… I think maybe I’ll never want anyone else.”

And then Alice says something I’d never expect her to say.

“Of course you’d think that. He’s your first love.”

I look up at her, shocked.

First love? As if what I had with Evan could be reduced to something as soft, as innocent, asthat. First love is meant to be sweet, sunlit, easily outgrown, not at all what I had with Evan, which was dark and tempestuous and simmering, an exhilarating disaster, a breathtaking, terrifying inevitability.

Alice’s stare is cool, her inky black eyes fixed on me with no sentimentality.

“I don’t believe in things like that,” I say thickly.

“So? Reality doesn’t care whether you believe in it or not.”

“Alice Lian Liu.” I raise myself up on one elbow to look at her. “You’rea romantic?”

She shrugs, the strap of her top slipping from her shoulder.

“I’m a realist. I believe in reality without hoping any more than what I already know to be true.” She sips her wine and tilts her head. “Did I ever tell you my parents met in boarding school?”

Of course she hasn’t. This is the first time I’ve ever been to her place, and the first time we’ve ever talked about anything other than school or work or law. I shake my head.

“They met in boarding school, just like you and your Evan. My father fell in love with her at first sight and told his parents he wanted to marry her. They were only sixteen, and there was already a plan for him to marry the daughter of some manufacturer. Dad refused. He broke the engagement. His parents put him through hell, sent him to America to study, tried paying her off, tried paying off her family. It didn’t work, none of it worked. My father came back and did exactly what he always said he’d do. He married my mother. They’ve been together ever since.”

“Youarea romantic,” I whisper. “Who would have thought?”

She gives me another roll of her eyes and leans slightly forward.

“I only ever saw him once—your Evan. That night, at the gala. And the way he looked at you wasn’t romantic, Sophie. It was far beyond that. He looked at you like you were a cult leader, and the key to heaven was right there in your hand, and he would’ve been willing to get on his knees right there and then to beg you for it.”

Her eyes move deliberately over my face, watching me the way a cat watches a mouse—patient, curious in a predatory way. I don’t need to look in a mirror to know what she sees: the flush creeping up along my throat and into my cheeks, the tightening of my fingers around the stem of my glass, the sharp intake of breath.

Alice smirks, slow and knowing. “You liked it, didn’t you?”

“I’mnota cult leader.”

“But you liked feeling like one. You liked having that power over him.” She shrugs. “And so what if you did? I can’t blame you. What woman wouldn’t enjoy absolute control? We’re born to it. We suit it, unlike men.”

Finally, something we agree on. Alice doesn’t give me time to relax into the thought, though.

“So the question is: if you want your little worshipper, andhewants to worship you, then why—”