“You look beautiful,” he told his girlfriend. Then, remembering they weren’t alone, he glanced at me. “You too, Felicity. Nice dress.”
I glanced down at my masquerade gown, smoothing out the fabric that was now stain free. “Thanks,” I said. It was the only dress I owned fancy enough for the occasion, and wearing it felt poetic, considering this might be the last time I ever saw Alec.
“So, you girls ready?”
“Give us two minutes,” Stella answered. “I’m just going to help Felicity fix her makeup, and then we’ll be right out.”
“Two minutes it is,” he said and backed out of the room.
When he was gone, Stella picked up my eyeliner and gently tugged me toward her. “Close your eyes,” she instructed. Twoseconds later, I felt the gentle brush of her hand on my cheek and the tip of the charcoal pencil against my lid. “I know you’re scared to talk to Alec, but it’s going to be all right. He’s hurting right now, and believe it or not, that’s a good thing. If he wasn’t, it would mean he didn’t care about you. People don’t agonize over someone who hasn’t touched their heart.”
She had a point, and it helped ease the churning of my stomach. “Thanks, Stella.”
“No problem. Okay, you can open up.” She took a step back and inspected her handiwork. “There! Alec won’t know what hit him.”
I glanced at the mirror. Somehow Stella had managed fix the squiggly line above my eye.
All right, I thought, sucking in a deep breath.You can do this, Felicity.
It was time to crash Vanessa Williams’s wedding.
Chapter 20
“I’ll be back in two hours tops,” Oliver told me as JJ, Xander, and Stella filed out of the suite.
I raised my hand in parting. “Have fun.”
As much as I wanted to make things right with Alec, I wasn’t going to ruin Vanessa’s big day by upsetting her little brother. I’d decided it would be best to wait until the ceremony and dinner ended before confronting him. The nuptials were taking place in the hotel’s grand ballroom, and once the party was in full swing, Oliver would pull Alec away from the reception and bring him upstairs.
Which meant that strictly speaking, I was only crashing the wedding in the broadest sense of the term.
“If you get hungry, order room service,” Oliver told me. “I’ll try to save you a piece of cake, but with JJ at the table, I can’t make any promises.”
“Don’t worry about me,” I replied. “Never been much of a frosting fan anyway.”
JJ gasped. “Toldyou she has no soul.”
Oliver rolled his eyes as he stepped into the hall. “See you in a bit,” he called, and then I was alone.
Not quite sure what to do with myself, I turned in a circle and surveyed my surroundings. There was a piano tucked into the far corner, a wall of shelves filled with books, a glass rock fireplace, and a handful of other luxuries I never expected to find in a hotel room. Any other day I would have been impressed with the grandeur of it all, but it was hard to appreciate when I could feel my heart fluttering around my chest like a caged bird. Without anyone to keep me company, my mind immediately found Alec. I had this terrible image in my head of him storming away as soon as he saw me, and I kept playing it over and over like some kind of sick movie.
When my palms started to sweat, I knew I needed a distraction. Some way to kill time so I didn’t have a heart attack before he arrived. I grabbed my travel copy ofTo Kill a Mockingbird, the one Violet had returned to me yesterday, and took a seat on the couch. I was too worked up to focus on reading, but there was comfort in holding my favorite novel.
As I flipped through the first chapter, I noticed something different about the usually familiar pages. Beneath my margin scribbles someone had left comments in near-perfect penmanship.
I drew in a sharp breath.
It was Alec’s handwriting. I was sure of it.
Not only had he read the book, but he’d responded to each of my thoughts. There were answers to the questions I’d posed, along with his own ideas and analyses. He even jotted down part of a song after the passage where Atticus tells Scout about Tom’s shooting. The lyrics were unfamiliar to me, but they fit the story so perfectly it was as if Harper Lee had written them herself:
With these wings we fly
Toward the clouds, sun, and sky
Until the dark of night arrives
And shatters us forever
