Page 52 of The Beautiful Ones

Octavia appeared beside me.

“Do not look frightened,” she murmured while pretending to admire the carved music stand. “Rooms like this forgive a beautiful woman almost anything except discovering that she doubts her own power.”

“It is not doubt.”

“Of course not.”

Her fan opened with a soft snap. Painted gardenias spread across the ivory leaves.

“Your mother believes she has recovered the daughter she deserved,” Octavia continued. “The gentlemen believe they have discovered a new entertainment. Even your brother is delighted because your transformation makes a better story than your suffering ever did.”

The words were cruel because they contained enough truth to wound.

“And what does Adrian believe?” I asked.

Octavia’s dark eyes found him across the room.

“Adrian believes you are becoming yourself.”

He turned toward me.

My throat opened.

I could have called Elin then. I saw her near the oak doors, pale with exhaustion, a tray balanced against one hip. Our eyes met across the parlor. The memory of the garden stood between us: my perfect, terrible speech and her quiet answer.

I heard every word.

Elin shifted the tray to Dinah and slipped through the rear doors.

I watched her go.

For two years, her presence had been the safest thing in my life. Her absence should have pulled me after her.

Instead, Adrian returned to the pianoforte and rested one hand upon its polished lid.

“Will you play again?” he asked.

A warning stirred somewhere beneath my happiness. It had Elin’s voice, but it was already growing faint.

“Yes,” I said.

The word came beautifully.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

ELIN

The house had become an island of cold illusion.

From my place near the oak doors, I watched Cécile move through the parlor like a queen crowned in sudden silver fluency. Her new voice was dazzling—hard, bright and stripped of the hesitant warmth I had spent two years protecting. Each clever remark earned laughter. Each cruel one earned more.

When her eyes found mine, they held the distant shine of polished glass.

To her, the girl who had wiped her tears, held her trembling hands and begged her parents to be kind had become merely an indentured servant who had outlived her usefulness.

I carried the empty tray through the rear doors before grief could make me foolish.

The courtyard heat struck with the force of an opened oven. Sunlight lay white upon the bricks, yet the shade beneath the arcade smelled of frozen earth and crushed gardenias. Behind me, applause rose again from the parlor.