four could have been heard over the din of the Drain.
Sloane hurriedly stuck her fingernail between her two front teeth to free the chunk of spinach.
The room finally quieted. Everyone turned to Matt, as obedient as students in a classroom.
“Thank you, and I’m sorry for the interruption,” Matt said, softening from Commander Matt to Politician Matt. “I was hoping you would all indulge me for a moment. Where’s Sloane?”
Sloane pulled her finger out of her mouth and straightened up. Matt beckoned to her, and she joined him in the middle of the ballroom under one of the chandeliers. Her chest was so tight, it hurt. He took her hand. She looked at him expectantly, noting that her hands had gone numb. She knew she should have had a third glass of champagne.
“I knew I was in love with Sloane about eleven years ago,” Matt said. “There was this little kid near one of the Drain sites where we had gone to investigate the Dark One, and he had lost track of his parents. And Sloane was carrying him around to every person she could see.”
Sloane remembered the kid. She had picked him up because he had refused to move, and she didn’t feel like arguing with him. She had been surprised by how easily he fell against her hip, given that she had never held a child before.
“She was just interrupting conversations to ask if anyone knew him. In that way Sloane does—if you know her, you know.” A low laugh spread through the crowd. Even the people who hadn’t met her could likely imagine, if they had read the dozen profiles that had been written about her in the past ten years calling her unstable, taciturn, moody, grouchy, a bitch. An antiheroine. Her cheeks flushed hot. Why was he making a joke of that now?
Matt went on. “Sloane’s like one of those Easter chocolates—she’s got a hard shell, but once you crack it, you get to the marshmallow-y good stuff in the middle.” He smiled, his eyes sparkling.
It was supposed to be sweet. Instead, Sloane felt like a child standing in a woman’s dress.
He took the ring box from his pocket, opened it, and got down on one knee. A few people around them gasped.
“Sloane, I love you. I’ve loved you for a long time.” His eyes were on hers, but all around them, people had taken out their phones and were aiming them in Sloane and Matt’s direction. This footage, like most videos of Sloane taken by strangers, would likely appear on television shows and in newspapers and on gossip blogs and be analyzed half to death. Her expression, her posture, her outfit, her goddamn lipstick.
Matt continued. “And I want to spend the rest of my life cracking that hard candy shell. Will you marry me?”
The crowd was like a giant animal, sighing as one.
Don’t let them see you, she told herself, the same thing she had told herself when the Dark One’s minions—all dead now; they had died with him—crept close in the middle of the night. But in this case, it didn’t mean that she should run away; it meant that she should hide in plain sight.
Sloane summoned everything she had ever learned about pretending from all the post-battle interviews she had done and smiled wide, hoping her eyes were sparkling. “Yes.” The word came out almost as a gasp, making her sound choked up—which was perfect, because then Matt leaped to his feet, hugged her, and spun her around, and no one was analyzing her expression anymore.
Everyone cheered, and there was a chorus of digital clicking sounds from all the smartphones, and news cameras rotated around them, capturing them from every angle—Matt in his tuxedo, Sloane in her beaded dress. The Chosen One and his blushing bride.
Who was, apparently, a goddamn piece of Easter candy.
Sloane was there, wishing there were a socially acceptable way to sponge sweat off one’s armpits so they would stop stinging, but she also wasn’t there.
She was by the river, the cold air burning her lungs, as she stared across the bridge at the Dark One right before their last battle. Part of her always would be.
6
SLOANE HAD HARDLY gotten the ring on her finger when the crowd swallowed her in congratulations. Someone thrust a champagne flute into her hand, and she looked for Matt, hoping she could plead with her eyes for an escape. But he was talking to an older gentleman in a suit and sipping a similar flute