Page 49 of The Princess and the Fraud

But I’d packed that part of me away. The cello was in the past. Mom’s dream house was the future. My throat was tight.

I traced the entirety of my right palm. It’d been nothing at all, Aaron picking my hand up, laying it atop of his own, forcing me to ride out the measures with him. And yet, it’d been everything—Aaron, even in the most fraudulent way possible, getting me to create music again for the first time in five years.

“Only for a moment,” I muttered, mood turning once more. “Because then he had to go back to his stuck-up self. Hopefully, he can just woo Fiona, have a courthouse wedding before she changes her mind, and by this time next month, we’ll be in 1442 Everview.”

I liked to think that my mother would’ve patted my back.Yes, she’d say.We will.

A sharp knock at my apartment’s front door had me freezing. When it came again, I pushed to my feet. The front door didn’t have a peephole—this complex wasthatsketchy—so I pressed my ear to the surface. “Hello?”

“Open the door,” a soft, feminine voice came from the other side, sounding very stressed. “Lovey, open up before someone drags me into their room and you see me on an episode ofDateline.”

The familiarity of the voice had me fumbling for the deadbolt. And, sure enough, when I opened the door, I found Caroline on the other side. She rushed me as soon as the gap opened wide enough, clutching two plastic bags.

“Jeez, I forgot you live in Skeeve City.” Caroline glanced around my apartment. “Were you talking to someone? I thought I heard something.”

“Thinking out loud.” She probably wouldn’t get it if I told her I’d been talking to my dead mother. “What are you?—”

Caroline lifted the plastic bags. “Wine and Chinese takeout! You still like Chinese, right?”

And just like that, she began unloading the takeout containers on my counter, instructing me to grab glasses, and settled in. It was strange to hear another person’s voice in the apartment; Caroline had picked me up a time or two, but she’d never been inside. The only life these walls had seen had been mine, and all at once, it almost feltwrong.

But I couldn’t say no, even if Caroline imposed.

I got out two plates for us to take our meals to the couch, since I didn’t have a proper dining room table. Caroline sat on one side of the coffee table while I sat on the other, the wine bottle and crab rangoons between us. We dispersed everything quite quickly—and drank the first glass of wine equally as fast.

“Sorry for not coming back last night,” Caroline mumbled as she tipped the bottle of wine up, pouring more into her glass. The tops of her cheeks were already growing pink. “Mom needed me for something, and I figured the Staff Princess would want to go home and sleep after a long day.”

I licked the soy sauce from my fingertip. “It’s okay.”

“Did you? Go straight home?”

As opposed to staying after and practically holding Aaron Astor’s hand?“Yeah.”

She gave her head a slow bob, ripping open her crab rangoon and using her fork to rake out the insides. “Listen,” she began, dunking the meat into one of the sauces. “I’m sorry for not telling you about Grant coming home.”

Hearing his name was like a snap of a rubber band. “It’s not like I’ve been asking you to keep me updated. I know how awkward it is, talking about him.”

Even when Grant and I had still been dating, Caroline and I rarely talked about her brother. It was as if they’d been two separate entities, two people in my life who coincidentally shared a last name. She never really asked me about our relationship, either. It was as if she, too, had been pretending it’d been separate.

She had assured me, though, that when I found out he’d been cheating, she’d had no idea. That she’d been as blindsided as I’d been. And we’d never talked about it since.

Caroline munched on her food, picking up her wine glass and swirling it, and I watched her. There was no visible anxiety from this conversation with me. I’d rehearsed over and over what I wanted to say, but she seemed to hold none of that nervousness. And now, a day later and two wine glasses deep, I’d forgotten what it was I’d practiced.

“You really didn’t know?” I asked.

“What? About Grant coming home?” Caroline wrinkled her nose. “I onlyjustfound out. Like, that day. Leave it to Fiona to make me seem like the bad guy, keeping it from you?—”

“That he had been cheating.”

Caroline stopped. She raised her head inch by inch, blinking at me with wine-hazed eyes. “You have to ask again?” she asked me, but in contrast with her words, her voice was incredibly gentle. “If I’d known, as your best friend, I wouldn’t have suggested you go surprise him at college, would I?”

“Of course you wouldn’t have,” I said quickly, scrubbing a hand over my forehead. I immediately hated myself for voicing my doubt. “I’m sorry—that was a dumb question.”

“Grant was an idiot, thinking he could two-time.” She dug into another crab rangoon. “When our dad introduced them, he should’ve said no. Especially since it was clear how much you meant to him.”

I don’t want to talk about this. The thought was almost blaring in my head. “Was it clear?”

“You disagree?”

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