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I looked up.
Eight pairs of eyes gazed up at me from the long, extravagantly adorned table, but my attention immediately cut to him. Joshua Motherfucking Goldman.
“You two know each other?” Julie asked.
Beside her, Alice sipped her tea, brows arching.
“What the hell are you doing here?” Josh asked, his tone on the rude side of accusatory.
He was dressed exactly how I would have expected. Fitted silver suit. Six-figure watch. Blonde waves tousled away from his sharp, handsome features. He screamed money, privilege, success, stolen dreams.
I’d knownwhat to expect, but it still ripped open the wound in the deepest, darkest pit of my soul, poured salt on it, and set it ablaze.
Life really wasn’t fucking fair, was it?
Josh’s steel gaze flicked to a movement behind me. Adrien, I assumed.
“What’s going on? What’s she doing here?” The question came from the middle-aged man sitting across the table from Josh. His father—Kenny Goldman.
“I don’t understand. How do you all know each other?” Julie asked, her smile flickering. The conversation was already starting to go in circles.
I recognized the shift in him before Josh even opened his maw and managed to steel myself for the bite. “Ariana’s father used to clean the toilets at our high school.” His eyes gleamed, that vicious mouth of his curling into an all-too-familiar condescending sneer.
Heads twisted in his direction, shoulders tensed. Gampy visibly bristled, his white brows ramming together with disapproval.
“Watch your fucking tone, Goldman.” Adrien stepped closer, his presence behind me growing broader.
Josh didn’t pay him any attention. He’d already locked in on his prey, there was no letting it go now.
“I heard the news,” he said. “Car crash, right? After a night shift?”
There was a ringing in my head. Somewhere near my left ear. The outskirts of my vision were beginning to blur, the air growing too thick to breathe.
“It’s too bad,” he went on. “Nice guy. Makes you think, eh?”
“Josh, enough,” Kenny cut in. “Can someone explain what the hell she’s doing here? Did you hire her as part of the staff?”
I was rooted in place, my throat constricted. I knew I had to move, knew that I was less than ten steps away from the door. But I couldn’t seem to get my body to follow the orders it was receiving from my brain.
Suddenly I was too aware of myself—my disheveled appearance, the deer-in-headlights expression, my lack of spine.
I was, in a word, pathetic.
There was a woman sitting to Josh’s left, the impressive diamond on her left hand winking at me.
Mandy was unsurprisingly lovely. Ethereal and elegant. Unlike me, her hair was not bunched into a haphazard ponytail that spilled out in all the wrong places. She was not in jeans, nor was she wearing a somewhat-crumpled shirt with growing sweat stains.
No. Mandy was wearing an off-shoulder summer dress with frills and flowers galore, dark hair spilling down at back in a silky waterfall that had never even heard of the word frizz.
She looked exactly like the type of woman you’d expect to see on Josh’s arm—the type of woman you’d expect to see on Adrien’s.
“They’re engaged.”
Anthony’s voice jerked me out of the depths of my own head. My lashes fluttered, cheeks bruising.
“We were going to wait until they joined us to share the news,” Julie said politely. “It’s their announcement to make, and we— Ria, honey, are you all right? Do you need to sit?”
“Who’sengaged?” Josh.
