Lethal Wedding (Wedlocked Trilogy Book 2) - Charlotte Byrd Page 0,13

quick breath and let it go.

"Well, that’s hard to say, since it’s not really an all-girls school the way that some of them are. It’s right across the street from Columbia University, being their sister school, going back to when Columbia was only for boys. I took a number of my classes at Columbia, in fact, I took the majority of my courses there. Besides, it’s also right in the middle of Manhattan. But I guess to answer your question, it was a good experience. I had a little bit of a sisterhood, which was really nice."

This is a lie. Though I enjoyed the school for its academic rigor, I didn’t really make any friends there.

Looking back now, I know that it was my fault.

I had never been particularly social and when girls tried to connect with me at the beginning of the year, I was too shy. After a while, they stopped asking.

I somehow lock myself off from people. Most probably assume that I'm stuck up or too good for them, but the reality is that I just don't know how to make friends.

On top of that, the course-load that I was taking was way too difficult and I always felt behind and out of control.

Even if I couldn’t study every waking hour of every day, I would sit in my room and procrastinate, thinking that just being at my desk was enough. And when you are so busy pretending to do work, you can't very well go out with anyone and actually take time off.

"Is everything okay?" Danielle asks.

I glance at her and realize that I had drifted off in the middle of the conversation.

"Yes, of course.” I snap my face and my plastic smile back into place. "I’m sorry about that, I just got lost in thinking about how happy Franklin makes me feel."

I squeeze his hand as I say this and he squeezes mine.

Looking at him from the outside, not even I can tell that he is not madly in love.

How does that line go again?

All the world's a stage and we are all just players. It’s in instances like these that it’s so easy to forget the truth.

"Well, this must be wonderful news for your family, Aurora," Danielle says. "I mean, given everything that has happened to your father…"

She doesn’t come out and directly mention the arrest or the heart attack but she expects me to comment on it anyway.

"Yes, it is a relief that the charges have been dropped and my father is okay. That was a very stressful situation for him, it’s one of the reasons why he suffered the heart attack in the first place."

"Mr. Tate is now at home resting and he will be back in fighting stance very soon," Franklin adds. "Let’s not forget that he is a giant of the industry and it will take a lot more than that to take him out of commission."

Danielle smiles, happily jotting down the quote that I know will probably appear somewhere in bold in the article, if not be incorporated into the headline.

The New York Chronicle is not directly owned by Tate Media but it is friendly to the company. That’s one of the reasons why they got the interview in the first place.

In our business, it is all about spin and creating the reality you want to live in so that others will join you there as well.

And the more articles that you can flood the world with that show everyone how wonderful you are, then the further you'll go in getting what you want.

"I also wanted to ask you about your father‘s arrest," Danielle says, catching me by surprise. We had previously come to an agreement about what she would and would not ask directly.

This question is out of bounds.

"Where were you when it happened?" she asks.

"At home," I say. "My mother showed up at my door really early in the morning and told me what happened. It was a really scary time because I had no idea why they would arrest him or why any of that was happening."

"Yes, I can imagine."

"And what about when you first heard about the charges? What did you think?"

My mind goes blank.

All I remember is how I felt finding out what had happened.

I wasn’t so much devastated for my father as I was angry with him for doing everything that he had done to get him in that situation.

Of course, people are arrested every day who are completely innocent of all of