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He pulled back, all serious eyes, full beard, and oversized work jacket that he forced around Molly’s shoulders despite the muggy August heat. “You’ll study hard.”

“I always do.”

“This is an amazing opportunity.”

“I know. That’s why I wanted to go here.”

Molly jumped when a car honked from behind them.

He pulled her into one more forceful hug, whispered, “Alright, I’ll get out of your hair. Love you, kid,” and suddenly he was in his truck. He was pulling away. And Molly was alone.

Until a skinny, blindingly blond, sour-looking boy emerged from the car that had honked at them. He was mostly elbows and knees, even under his pristine school uniform and carefully styled hair. He had the look of those boys who hadn’t stretched out yet, but whose bones were in the process of preparing for it.

As the car he’d exited quickly pulled away, a similarly blond man in the driver’s seat, Molly couldn’t help but compare the length of this boy’s goodbye with her own.

She watched as his attention followed the retreating car, face pinching. He frowned, glancing down at the suitcase beside him then back at the car again. He hadn’t even gotten a wave. That, maybe more than her dad’s many hugs, made her want to cry again. She bled pity, feeling terrible for his nonexistent farewell.

When his eyes met hers, he sneered.

His gaze raked up and down her person with a scoff that leaked disdain. Molly pulled her dad’s jacket tighter around her middle.

“What’d you do, beg a local hobo to drop you off?” he said in cut-glass tones before turning on his heel to leave.

Chapter 2

Pawntès Graham

It took more effort than Molly expected, asking Roy to deliver her to her doom. Or her home. With her husband. The terms felt more or less interchangeable.

Once they’d dropped Alannah off to relieve the babysitter, Molly felt as if she entered a fugue state until the moment she and Roy walked up to an unfamiliar door at an unfamiliar second-floor apartment in an unfamiliar and aging complex.

Molly looked down, breath briefly catching at the not-at-all-unfamiliar welcome mat beneath her. It read, “I hope you like cats,” and featured several whimsical cat silhouettes going about their cat business on the bottom border. She’d found it at a craft fair before her freshman year of college, and she’d dragged it from dorm to dorm and eventually to the apartment she and Alannah shared, the place she . . . well, used to live six years ago, apparently.

And now it sat here, shattering any carefully deluded hope that no version of her had ever existed in this place. This place she shared with her alleged husband.

The door swung open the moment Roy’s knuckles made contact, revealing a ghostly Aster Bishop. He remained a haunted, quiet presence.

In an awkward shuffle of silences and false starts, Molly found herself standing inside the apartment, wide-eyed as she looked around.

The living room in front of her was cramped and much smaller than any place she would have imagined someone like Bishop inhabiting. He came from the kind of unfathomable generational wealth that collected country homes as a hobby and footed the bill for an entire baseball team’s winter ski trip (Roy would know).

But small as it was, the room certainly looked like it had been decorated from a stuffy, uber-wealthy estate sale. So, there was the nail in that coffin. Aster Bishop definitely lived here.

“Is that . . . a navy . . . damask . . . sofa?” she asked, caught somewhere between exasperation and awe at the living room’s star piece of furniture. It was maybe the most heinous thing she’d ever laid eyes on, calling firmly to mind the Bishop family crest, a navy and silver monstrosity. It was a strange side effect of attending prep school with some of the wealthiest and most influential families in the country: Molly had learned there were still people out there who took their family crests very seriously. They’d become entire branding opportunities in the modern era, apparently.

From beyond where Roy stood between them, Bishop said weakly, “It’s a royal-blue brocade.”

Of all things. “Seriously?”

There was a beat of silence. Then, like a dam breaking, Bishop broke out into a peal of laughter. It poured from him in an uncontrollable burst that seemed to infect Roy as well, because he started laughing too, so hard that he had to bend forward, bracing himself against his knees.

Molly’s annoyance at being left out of a joke fizzled when she saw Bishop’s face. She wasn’t sure she’d ever seen him laugh like that, not without the sneer of having landed an insult beneath it. The corners of his eyes crinkled, his white, perfectly straight teeth on full display.

He had a damn dimple on the left side of his mouth.

She put her hands on her hips. “Well?”

Bishop sobered, face briefly softening. His sterling-blue gaze met hers for what felt like the first time in Molly’s entire life.