Page 16 of Always

Gwen and Hannah exchanged an annoyed glance when they saw Stella sitting in Hannah’s chair. Still, they greeted her politely. She was the CEO’s daughter, and spiteful enough to get them fired.

Between James and Stella, the coldness was palpable. James obviously remembered their meeting, back when he and Anika were dating. Stella had hardly been subtle in her rudeness.

But now she found herself in a predicament. Stella hated to relinquish a poor opinion once formed. Yet James had risen drastically in wealth and success since their last encounter. He had only been in town a few days before she’d heard of his connection to a dozen trendy people.

An apology was out of the question. But pretending they’d never met at all didn’t serve her purposes either. Instead Stella adopted the strategy of selective amnesia.

“James!” she cried, ignoring Hannah, Gwen, and Calvin. “So good to see you again! It’s so nice of you to help us with the gala. I saw Angela Whitmore this morning, and she told me her father is putting a piece about it in thePost.You know Angela, don’t you? She and I go way back. She said she went skiing with you once in Aspen. With Marley Perkins and Jem Black. I know them both as well, of course. We must have a hundred friends in common.”

She laughed a high, false laugh. James nodded, but he didn’t smile back at her. Anika was relieved to see that there was still no falseness in him. He wasn’t going to play at social niceties with Stella.

“I’d better get going,” James said. “See you all tomorrow.”

“He’s certainly filled out,” Stella said approvingly, before he was quite out of earshot. “He used to be so skinny.”

“Did you know him before?” Gwen asked eagerly.

Gwen had gathered over several weeks that there was some kind of history between James and Anika, but as no one involved had been willing to elaborate, it was time to turn to a new source for information. Even if that meant talking to Stella.

Unfortunately for Gwen, Stella wasn’t likely to relay any tidbits not strictly complimentary to herself. For instance, she had no desire to share the fact that her sister once dated someone who had turned out to be quite a catch.

“We’ve known each other eight years or so,” she said airily. “We know all the same people. It’s a small world at the top.”

“How did you meet?” Gwen pressed.

“Hmm, at a dinner, I think? He complimented my Birkin bag.”

That was true. They had met at a dinner, one that Anika had arranged at James’s behest. She’d made reservations at a small sushi restaurant that had been her mother’s favorite. Stella cancelled that reservation and booked a table at a trendy steakhouse instead. James had ordered a side salad, not having the funds to pay for the forty-dollar-per-ounce Wagyu, and not wanting Bennet to pay for his dinner.

Stella wrinkled her nose at his meal, saying, “Is that what programmers eat? I thought it was all pizza and twinkies.”

James had indeed complimented her purse, which Stella had been displaying like a Price is Right model.

“It’s a Birkin,” Stella sneered, “There’s a two-year wait-list.”

“Really!” James said in mock admiration. “Did you stand outside the store that whole time? You must be exhausted.”

Bennet hadn’t been any friendlier. He often forgot that he had once lived a life devoid of vampire facials and foie gras on toast. Besides that, he had a general disdain for non-creative jobs, which he thought a monkey could do—or, more likely, a machine once the whole world became automated.

“You’re building the computers that will do your job soon,” he told James more than once.

James had observed that Bennet’s level of technological understanding lay somewhere between a Facebook-savvy grandma and a bright third-grader, so he didn’t bother to argue.

He spent the whole dinner in a state of incredible restraint, never rising to the bait as Bennet and Stella maligned his education, his career path, his clothing, his lack of travel experience, and his ambitions for the future.

Anika cringed, remembering every ignorant comment and cruel quip made by her father and sister. She cursed herself for ever subjecting James to those people, and worst of all, for not standing up for him at that dinner. She had sat there in silence, too used to her family’s rudeness to even register the full extent of their awfulness. Of course she hated that they were talking to James that way, but she was accustomed to suffering in silence.

It was James who showed her how she should have reacted. The only time he got angry that night was when Stella mocked Anika’s poor grades in the semester following their mother’s death.

“Let me stop you right there,” James said. “Anika is brilliant. I’ve never met someone with a memory like hers, or her vocabulary, or creativity. She makes the average person look like an idiot next to her.”

He didn’t have to specify that Stella was the average idiot sitting next to Anika—his expression made that plain.

He didn’t hesitate for a moment to defend her, to express his admiration and love for her.

Anika had been ashamed of herself then, and she was ten times as ashamed now. Because out of all the people amazed at James’s success, she alone hadn’t been the least bit surprised. She had known his worth completely. But she’d been too much of a coward to declare it.

Of course, Stella didn’t relate any of this to Gwen, and Anika said nothing at all. Instead, she launched into a deliberately tedious recitation of the items remaining on their to-do list, until Stella interrupted to say, “I just remembered I have dinner plans!” and hurried out of the office.

---