Page 104 of Rivals

She sucked in a shaky breath. “Let me fix this, please.”

“I don’t think you can,” Jefferson told her. “You haven’t been acting like yourself for a while now.”

As if he even knew what it was like when shedidact like her real self.

“I’ve been dealing with a lot,” she started to say, but Jefferson spoke over her.

“We’re all dealing with a lot, Daphne! I lost my dad this year! That doesn’t mean I have free license to take advantage of the people I love,” he said darkly. “I’ve been trying to make excuses for your behavior, but I don’t know how to explain this. For years, you have been one of the few people I trusted, and I thought you appreciated what that meant.”

“I’m sorry,” she repeated, because there was nothing else to say.

Jefferson stood and ran a hand over his hair, looking wounded and bewildered. “I have to go.”

Daphne knew better than to chase after him. She just sat there and watched as he walked away.

Samantha found Beatrice at the front of the ballroom, surrounded, as always, by a cluster of people. Though she noted, surprised, that Teddy wasn’t one of them.

“Bee! Do you have a minute?” Sam couldn’t handle the clamor of her own thoughts anymore. She had to talk this out with someone, and as amazing a friend as Nina was, she needed her sister right now.

Especially because some of what she was thinking—hoping—was a problem that only Beatrice could help solve.

“Of course, Sam. What’s going on?”

Sam was so eager to unload all her confusion on Beatrice, it took a moment for her to notice that her sister didn’t look quite right. Her gown was spectacular, a deep gunmetal gray—much more sophisticated than Beatrice’s usual pastels or champagne-colored choices—with metallic embroidery scattered over the bodice. Its shimmer echoed the diamonds that flashed at her throat, in her ears, atop her dark brown hair.

But there was something mechanical and forced about Beatrice’s smile. She kept glancing around the room, distracted, and there were purple shadows beneath her eyes.

Sam frowned. “Are you okay?”

“It’s been a long night,” Beatrice said evasively. A few wisps of hair had come free from her sleek updo, which wasn’t at alllike Beatrice; Sam reached up to fix one, feeling guilty. She’d been so swept up in her own problems that she hadn’t exactly been a great support system for Beatrice lately.

“Forget it. We can talk later,” Sam started to say, but Beatrice shook her head.

“You know I always have time for you. Should we go somewhere a little more private?”

Beatrice led them out of the ballroom and down the hallway, where she pushed open the door to her study. Sam realized that she hadn’t been in here since the day of the photo shoot.

Beatrice settled into an armchair, but Sam wandered restlessly over to the desk. She picked up a clay hedgehog that she’d made for her father in second grade, which he—and now apparently Beatrice—used as a paperweight.

“I remember when I made this hedgehog for Dad.”

“That’s a hedgehog? I always thought it was a skunk,” Beatrice said, with a hint of a smile. “Or a rat?”

“Why would I have made a rat sculpture?”

“Beats me. It just seemed like something eight-year-old Sam would have done,” Beatrice replied. She had a point.

Sam moved the hedgehog restlessly from one hand to the other. “I miss Dad so much.”

“So do I, Sam. All the time.”

Their shared sorrow hung in the air between them. It was easy for Sam to think of her grief as something she carried alone, like a locket she could never take off, the weight of its chain forever there on her chest.

But of course, it wasn’t like that at all. They were all grieving for her dad: she and Beatrice, Jeff, their mom, the entireworld.It was more accurate to think of their grief like the swell of the ocean, its soft rumble always in the background, something they could all sense, and share.

Sam felt Beatrice looking at her and came to sit in the opposite armchair. Still she kept fidgeting, setting the hedgehog on a glass side table and picking up a book, fanning idly through its pages. Beatrice was patient, waiting for her to speak.

“I talked with Aunt Margaret tonight.”