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I roll my eyes because my sister knows damn well where I went on my year as an exchange student in America. She thinks she’s hilarious.
“No, that’s Idaho. Feckin’ eejit.”
She snorts. “Whatever the fuck gets you out of the house.”
When I rejoin Maggie to work on the car, I sense her eyeballing me.
“What the hell are you smiling about?”
“Feeling lucky,” is all I say.
ChapterTwo
Serenity
My assistant scribbles very loudly in her appointment book.
Ellen loves that book, and she loves ticking off agenda items, underlining things, and scrawling notes in the margins.
She’s like an adorable younger sister who enjoys bossing me around like a big sister. And I would be lost without her. I just wish she was a tenth less driven before my caffeine has kicked in for the day.
“One more thing,” Ellen says, tapping the end of her pen to her lips. She’s already put on a full face of makeup at 7 a.m., fetched my dry cleaning and my Starbucks.
I am not a morning person, as evidenced by my sitting braless in my favorite bathrobe, luxuriating in my velvet chair in my dressing room.
I tuck my bare feet under me and smile up at her. “Yes?”
“You asked me to give you some time to consider the invitation to your high school reunion? They need an RSVP this week. Do you want me to throw that away? I know how you are about paper lying around, so if you want me to go ahead and recycle it…”
I glance out my dressing room window that overlooks the waves crashing against the Malibu shore. The orange puff ball in my lap wiggles, and I scratch my Pomeranian behind her ears. “Am I really doing this, Duchess?”
My assistant received the letter months ago, and it’s been nagging at me.
“We should go, right?” The diamond dog collar sparkles. Duchess yips and wags her tail.
“It’s decided then.”
I look up at the golden statue on my mantle and smile. If my tormentors could see me now. I bought this house because it came with a fireplace in a dressing room—a room bigger than the apartment I grew up in.
From Gold Hill, Ohio, to the Golden Globes.
All the rich bullies back home can eat shit.
But is that a reason to attend a class reunion? Just to rub everyone’s nose in my success?
Maybe that’s enough.
Maybe seeing them again will be enough to stop them from living rent-free in my head. That’s what my therapist advises.
Also…I’m not above a little bit of pettiness.
I could swoop in and be gone in five minutes. Just to make an appearance.
There’s one other thing that piques my interest—the one person who made my senior year livable.
Cian O’Connor, the exchange student from Dublin. My first crush, my first kiss, my friend.
I close my eyes for a second and recall the memory. He’d just completed building a set for our production ofAnne of Green Gables, and he was helping me go over lines. The student who played Gilbert was a buffoon who never knew his lines, and Cian was there for me.
