Page 96 of Party Favors

Claudia usually arrived right at nine o’clock, and I wanted to be at my desk, just in case. She wasn’t in yet, though.

My desk phone rang a few minutes after I sat down. “This is Everly Aprile.”

“It’s Mom.”

I frowned. She didn’t usually call me at work. “Is everything okay? Is Meemaw doing all right?”

“She’s fine. You haven’t been answering your phone.”

That was because I had turned it off. I had been working the last couple of days, but I’d also been thinking about what I wanted to do as far as Max was concerned and I didn’t want any outside distractions.

Plus, it had been my cowardly way of avoiding having to speak or interact with him before I was ready.

My decision-making might have all been for nothing—he could have just ghosted me entirely, and then the decision would have been taken out of my hands.

That thought made me feel sick to my stomach. I didn’t want him to ditch me.

So I’d avoided giving him a choice by making myself inaccessible. He couldn’t ghost me if I was unaware of it.

Not exactly mature, but it had helped me to get a lot of work done.

I turned my cell phone back on and waited a few seconds until it was on. There were a bunch of texts from my mom, a couple of missed phone calls, but nothing at all from Max. Complete and total silence.

My heart fell. I had thought I mattered to him, had hoped that the kisses meant something, but they obviously hadn’t. He couldn’t have made it any clearer that he wasn’t interested in me. That the kisses had been some kind of mistake that would never happen again.

I wanted to start crying.

“Sorry about that,” I said to my mother. “What’s up?”

“I was calling to see if you got the promotion.”

“Mom, it’s first thing Monday morning. Nobody else is even here yet. And it’ll be a long process.” There would be a lot of people who’d have to sign off on it.

“Well, when that Claudia woman arrives, you should go into her office and insist that you talk about it right away.”

I tried to not feel completely exasperated with her. That was not how things worked here.

This was the first time my mom and I had chatted since Princess Chiara got married. We’d had an hour-long conversation about the wedding where we’d discussed what everyone had been wearing, howPrincess Violetta seemed to be glowing and had briefly touched her stomach, making us wonder if she might be pregnant, and how Princess Serafina had been on her phone the entire time but tried to hide it from the cameras.

It had been such a fun talk—I wished we could always be like that. I wished that I could talk to her about Max and have her listen, really listen, just so that I could vent. Maybe she’d even have some insight to share and a guess as to why he’d been so weird.

I didn’t tell her, though, because I knew how things would go.

“Good morning, doll. Can I see you in my office?”

My mouth dropped open.

Adrian Stone was here and heading toward his desk like he hadn’t disappeared for the last two weeks.

“Mom, I have to go. I’ll call you later.” I hung up the receiver in its cradle, not even bothering to let her respond.

Adrian. It was so weird seeing him. I realized with a start that I hadn’t thought about him at all for a long time.

Like I had shoved him completely out of my mind.

He sat down at his desk and turned his computer on. When I entered the room, he said, “Please shut the door.”

In all the time I’d worked here, he’d never asked me to do that. I closed the door until it latched into place. I sat down across from him, suddenly a bit nervous. Did he know how Claudia was changing things? Was he going to blame me for it? Be upset that I didn’t keep him updated on what was happening at Elevated?

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