“Can’t a girl come to visit her childhood best friend on his birthday?”
Lia and I made it downstairs in time to hear Celine explaining her
presence to Michael. Sloane stood just behind him, a stubbornly protective expression on her face. I wondered if she was feeling protective of Michael— or of Lia.
“You followed us.” Michael didn’t sound entirely surprised. “Followed,” Celine repeated. “Bribed some people to keep tabs on you.
Same difference.” Without missing a beat, she turned to Sloane. “You must be one of Michael’s friends. I’m Celine.”
“You faked your own kidnapping.” In Sloane’s world, that passed for a greeting. “It is my understanding that is highly abnormal behavior.”
Celine shrugged. “Did I fake a ransom note? Call in a phony tip to the police?”
“You’re saying that you didn’t do anything illegal.” Dean entered the room and inserted himself into the conversation before Lia could.
“I’m saying that if someone wants to trash their own art studio and skip off to one of their vacation homes for a week, it’s hardly their fault if someone assumes there’s been foul play.”
“And I’m saying,” Sloane countered, “I’m saying…” She trailed off, uncertain of a proper comeback. “I’m saying that the average miniature donkey lives between twenty-five and thirty-five years!”
Celine grinned, the expression less practiced than any I’d seen cross her face. “I like her,” she told Michael decisively. “She says what she’s thinking. Our social circle could use more of that, don’t you think?”
Your social circle, I corrected silently. It’s not Michael’s. Not anymore. “In the interest of saying what we’re thinking,” Lia interjected, “if you’re
really here to celebrate Michael’s birthday, perhaps we should get this party under way?”
Michael had the good sense to look alarmed.
“I’m thinking a game might be in order,” Lia continued.
“A game?” Celine arched an eyebrow. “What kind of game?”
Lia looked at Michael, then smiled wickedly. “How about Never Have I
Ever?”
I wasn’t sure how Michael had intended to spend his birthday, but I suspected it wasn’t sitting beside the pool in our backyard with Lia on one side and Celine on the other.
“The rules are simple,” Lia said, dipping her toes into the pool. Even heated, it had to be chilly. “Everyone starts with ten fingers up. Each time someone names something you’ve done before, a finger comes down.” She let that sink in, then started the game off with a bang. “Never have I ever been kidnapped, threatened, or shot by an UNSUB.”
I saw the subtext there: whatever world Celine and Michael had shared, this was Lia’s way of telling the other girl that she didn’t know a thing about him now.
I lowered a finger. Dean and Michael followed suit.
Celine remained remarkably unruffled. “Never have I ever used the word
UNSUB like that’s a perfectly normal thing for a teenager to say.”
Dean, Michael, Lia, and I all lowered fingers. Lia cleared her throat to get Sloane’s attention.
“I don’t say anything like it’s perfectly normal,” Sloane clarified. “Ninety- eight percent of the time I’m not normal at all.” She paused. “Never have I ever not known the first hundred digits of pi.”
Michael groaned. Every player but Sloane lowered a finger. I was down to seven, and we’d only been through three rounds.
“Your turn,” Celine told me. “Make it a good one.”
I glanced over at Lia. “Never have I ever lived in a bathroom at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.”
Lia smirked, then slowly lowered the middle finger on her left hand. “Seriously?” Celine asked.
Lia met the other girl’s gaze, a dangerous glint in her eyes. “Seriously.” Dean must have sensed that the look in Lia’s eyes didn’t bode well—for
Celine, for Michael, for Lia—because he chose that moment to enter the game. “Never have I ever,” he said slowly, “made out with Michael Townsend.”
“Someday, big guy,” Michael told him with a wink. “If you’re very, very good.”
I stared at Dean, then lowered a finger. Why would you say something like that? I wondered, but as Lia lowered a finger, I realized exactly why Dean had chosen that statement.
Celine didn’t move.
“Never have I ever,” Michael said after a moment, “rashly assumed that my significant other was in love with a girl that I’d never met.”
Lia lowered a finger and rearranged the fingers on her left hand so that only the middle finger was sticking up. “Never have I ever used the phrase significant other,” she retorted.
“Technically,” Sloane pointed out, “you just did.”
Celine snorted. “Never have I ever had a thing for blondes,” she said. And then, her eyes on Sloane, she shot our statistician a dazzling smile and lowered her own finger—meaning that she did have a thing for blondes.
You’ve never made out with Michael, I realized, because Michael isn’t your type.
“Never have I ever not wanted a miniature donkey,” Sloane offered, completely oblivious to the fact that Celine was flirting with her.
It was my turn again. “Never have I ever faked my own disappearance because of something Thatcher Townsend said to me.”
Michael’s father had denied that he’d slept with Celine, gone to see her the day she disappeared, and threatened her. But, as Lia had pointed out, his denial could ring true if he was telling the truth about any one of the three.
Maybe he didn’t sleep with you, but went to see you anyway. Maybe he threatened you about something else.
Celine—brash and bold and fearless—lowered a finger.
“Never have I ever been threatened because of one of my father’s business dealings.” Dean took a shot next, but struck out.
Celine turned to Michael. “This is getting tedious,” she told him. Clearly, whatever Thatcher Townsend had said to her, she wasn’t in a sharing mood.
There was a moment of silence, and then Lia filled it. “Never have I ever
let someone beat the crap out of me.”
That brought Michael’s attention from Celine to Lia. “You got me,” he said, gesturing toward his swollen lip. “Very insightful.”
Instead of replying, Lia dropped her left hand. It took me a moment to realize that, in doing so, she’d brought down her middle finger, too. With a start, I realized that was Lia’s way of telling Michael that she’d been exactly where he was.
There was another long stretch of silence, and then: “Never have I ever been publicly acknowledged by my own father.” Celine’s voice was rough in her throat, like the exchange that had just passed between Michael and Lia had meant something to her, too.
Sloane stared at Celine. Since my father had acknowledged me, I lowered a finger. So did Dean. So did Michael. So did Lia.
But Sloane’s fingers stayed up. “Are you illegitimate, too?” she asked Celine. There was no judgment in her voice, no awareness that the question wasn’t the kind that people could politely ask.
Michael turned to look at Celine, searching her face for answers. “CeCe?” If Celine was illegitimate, Michael clearly hadn’t known. I thought about
the emotions that he’d read on his father’s face when Celine was missing.
Furious. Affronted. Personally insulted.
Hungry.
A man like Thatcher Townsend hungered for things he couldn’t have.
Things that someone had denied him. Things that are rightfully yours.
Suddenly, I saw the whole situation from a different perspective—why Thatcher might have gone to see Celine, why Celine might have responded the way she had, why she’d followed Michael back here, why Thatcher Townsend had involved himself in the investigation from the get-go.
She has her father’s temper, I thought, Elise Delacroix’s statement taking on new meaning in my mind. Not Remy Delacroix’s. Her father’s. Michael’s father’s.
Michael turned away from the secrets he saw laid bare on Celine’s face. “As the birthday king, it is within my rights to demand a rumpus of Where the Wild Things Are proportions. And as it happens,” he continued, masking his own emotions the way that only an emotion-reader could, “as the recipient of a recently released trust fund, I have a few ideas.
