I took off the necklace and stood holding it in front of the mirror. The hair was a bigger problem. It had taken two people to put it up. It would take an act of God for me to get it down.
“Avery?” Alisa stuck her head into the bathroom.
“Help me,” I told her.
“With what?”
“My hair.”
I reached back and started pulling at it, and Alisa caught my hands in hers. She transferred my wrists to her right hand and flipped a lock on the bathroom door with her left. “I shouldn’t have pushed you,” she said, her voice low. “This is too much, too soon, isn’t it?”
“Do you know who I look like?” I asked her. I shoved the necklace in her face. She took it from my hands.
She frowned. “Who you look like?” That seemed like an honest question from a person who didn’t like asking questions she didn’t already know the answers to.
“Emily Laughlin.” I couldn’t keep from cutting a glance back to the mirror. “Thea dressed me up just like her.”
It took Alisa a moment to process that. “I didn’t know.” She paused, considering. “The press won’t, either. Emily was just an ordinary girl.”
There was nothing ordinary about Emily Laughlin. I didn’t know when I’d come to believe that. The moment I’d seen her picture? My conversation with Rebecca? The very first time Jameson had said her name, or the first time I’d said it to Grayson?
“If you stay in this bathroom much longer, people will take note,” Alisa warned me. “They already have. For better or worse, you need to get out there.”
I’d come tonight because in some twisted way I’d thought that putting on a happy face would protect Libby. I’d hardly be here if my own sister had tried to have me killed, would I?
“Fine,” I told Alisa through gritted teeth. “But if I do this for you, I want your word that you’ll protect my sister in any way you can. I don’t care what your deal is with Nash, or what Nash’s is with Libby. You don’t just work for me anymore. You work for her, too.”
I saw Alisa swallowing back whatever it was she really wanted to say. All that exited her mouth was: “You have my word.”
I just had to make it through dinner. A dance or two. The live auction. Easier said than done. Alisa led me to the pair of tables that the Hawthorne Foundation had purchased. At the table on the left, Nan was holding court among the white-haired set. The table on the right was half-filled with Hawthornes: Zara and Constantine, Nash, Grayson, and Xander.
I made a beeline for Nan’s table, but Alisa sidestepped and gently steered me to the seat directly next to Grayson. Alisa took the next chair over, leaving only three open seats—at least one of which I assumed was for Jameson.
Beside me, Grayson said nothing. I lost the battle not to flick my eyes in his direction and found him staring straight ahead, not looking at me—or anyone else at the table.
“I didn’t do this on purpose,” I told him under my breath, trying to keep the expression on my face normal for the benefit of our audience, partygoers and photographers alike.
“Of course not,” Grayson replied, his tone stiff, the words rote.
“I’d take the braid out if I could,” I murmured. “But I can’t do it myself.”
His head tilted down slightly, his eyes closing, just for a moment. “I know.”
I was overcome then by the mental image of Grayson helping Emily take down her hair, his fingers working the braid out, bit by bit.
My arm bumped Alisa’s wineglass. She tried to catch it but didn’t move fast enough. As the wine stained the white tablecloth red, I realized what should have been obvious right from the beginning, from the moment the will had been read.
I didn’t belong here in this world—not at a party like this, not sitting beside Grayson Hawthorne. And I never would.
