open a door I didn’t even see. She leads me into a fancy room with the biggest piano I’ve ever seen. Tall bookcases line the three walls, and a balcony overlooks the ballroom below. Music, laughter, and conversation float up to us.
“Should I be here?” I whisper, even as she pulls me closer to the railing.
“If anyone catches us, I’ll tell them I wanted you to set up refreshments for me and my friends.” She gives a final tug on my hand before dropping it and turning to look out at her party. “When I was a little girl and my parents had parties, I’d sneak out of bed and watch them from up here.”
“They didn’t see you?”
She shakes her head. “No, not with the way the lights in the ballroom are. Mom said it was designed that way by my grandmother so she could spy on her guests.”
With that bit of reassurance, I take the last step to the railing and look down at the party below.
The biggest party I ever went to was Aunt Lori’s wedding when I was five or six. I remember thinking her husband, a schoolteacher, must’ve been spectacularly rich to afford to feed fifty people for dinner. But Brinley’s birthday party is at least three times that big, and everyone in the ballroom below is dressed in formal gowns and tuxedos. It doesn’t look real. It looks like something from TV, and it’s the perfect reminder that I belong back in the kitchen, not here with Brinley.
She growls softly, and I arch a brow in question. “See that?” she asks. She points to the dance floor, where teenagers and adults alike sway to Norah Jones’s “Come Away with Me.”
“Dancing?” I ask.
“No, the guy in the white tux eating the face off the girl in red.”
The white tux makes it easier to single out the couple in question. They’re on the dance floor, but dancing seems secondary to making out.
“That’s Roman,” she says. “Jerk couldn’t even wait until after my party before moving on.”
Roman’s hands move up and down the girl’s back before settling on her butt. “Total ass,” I agree. “You can’t tell me you really want to be with a guy like that.”
“I . . .” She shrugs. “I guess I thought I did, but maybe for the wrong reasons?”
“What were those?”
She cuts her eyes away from me, as if she knows I won’t like the answer. “My parents are friends with his parents. He’s . . . a good match, as my parents would say.”
“I can’t pretend I know what it’s like to have that kind of pressure. The only thing my mom expected of me was for me to leave the house when she had her guys over and that I didn’t call the cops when she was dealing.” As soon as I see the sorrow in her gaze, I regret saying it. “Don’t look at me like that.”
“Like what?”
“Like you pity me. We all have bullshit in our lives. Mine’s just a little less shiny than yours.”
“I don’t pity you.” She gives a shaky smile. “If anything, I envy you.”
I scoff. “Yeah, right.”
“You know what I see when I look at you? Freedom. I’ll never have that, not as long as I’m a Knox.”
I want to argue that being on probation hardly makes me the icon of freedom, but I get what she’s saying. There are expectations that come with this kind of money. More money, more problems or whatever. “That’s pretty depressing.”
She shrugs. “My parents are pretty depressing.” She steps closer, and the back of her hand brushes mine. I hold my breath and tamp down the impulse to thread my fingers with hers. I have no business touching a girl like this.
Suddenly, the music goes quiet, and everyone turns to the ballroom entrance, where a frail girl with long red hair walks into the room. She’s wearing a light blue version of Brinley’s dress, and when she lifts her hand and waves like some sort of pageant queen, the room erupts in applause.
“Who’s that?” I ask Brinley.
“My sister, Brittany,” she says softly.
I frown. “Is it her birthday too or something?”
“No. But she . . .” She swallows. “She’s been sick. It’s kind of a big deal that she’s even home right now, and a bigger deal that she’s out of bed. She’s spent more time in the hospital than out of it this year.”
“I’m so sorry.”
“Me too.” There’s more than sorry there in the anguished lines of her