Michael’s idea of a party involved an amusement park rented out for the evening for our amusement and our amusement alone.
“Do I want to know how much this cost?” Dean asked.
“Doubtful,” Michael replied. “Do I want to know why you have a phobia of integrating colors into your wardrobe? Almost certainly not!”
When I’d first met Michael, I’d found him difficult to profile. But now I understood. Reading emotions was never your only survival mechanism. He’d learned not to feel things, to turn everything into a joke, to shrug off revelations that shook his worldview to its core.
A quick glance at Celine told me that was a trait they shared. The edges of her lips quirked up in a slight smile. “Not bad,” she told Michael, taking in the lights of the Ferris wheel in the distance.
“What can I say?” he replied. “Good taste runs in the family.” The subtext to those words was deafening.
Sloane frowned. “The number of taste buds one has is heritable, but that does not affect aesthetic or entertainment preferences, to the best of my knowledge.”
Celeste didn’t miss a beat. “The brainy type,” she declared loftily. “I approve.”
Sloane was quiet for several seconds. “Most people don’t.”
My heart hurt at the matter-of-fact way Sloane said those words.
Her manner uncharacteristically gentle, Celine hooked an arm through Sloane’s. “How would you feel about trying to win me a goldfish?”
Sloane clearly had no idea how to reply, so she went with the path of least resistance. “Goldfish don’t have stomachs or eyelids. And their resting attention span is actually one-point-oh-nine times that of the average human.”
As Celine led Sloane toward the carnival games, I started to follow, but Michael held me back. “She’ll be fine,” he told me. “Celine is…” He trailed off, then changed course. “I trust her.”
“It’s good to have someone you can trust.” Lia’s tone wasn’t cutting, but that meant nothing. She was more than capable of coating razor blades in sugar.
“I never said you could trust me,” Michael shot back. “I don’t trust me.” “Maybe I’m saying that you can trust me.” Lia played with the tips of her
jet-black ponytail, making those words sound like nothing more than a lark. “Or maybe I’m saying that you absolutely cannot trust me not to wreak vengeance upon you in creative and increasingly absurd ways.”
With that somewhat concerning statement, Lia hooked her arm through Dean’s the way Celine had hooked hers through Sloane’s. “I see a roller coaster with my name on it, Dean-o. You game?”
Lia rarely asked Dean for anything. He wasn’t about to refuse now. As the two of them peeled off from the group, I pushed down the instinct to follow.
“And then,” Michael murmured, “there were two.” We ended up in the house of mirrors.
“You’re trying very hard not to profile me,” Michael commented as we wove our way through the mazelike expanse.
“What gave me away?” I asked.
He tapped two fingers against my temple, then indicated the tilt of my chin. We passed a set of curvy mirrors that distorted our reflections, stretching them out, condensing them, the colors in my reflection blending into the colors in his. “I’ll save you the effort, Colorado. I’m a person who wants what he can’t have as a method of proving to himself that he doesn’t deserve the things he wants. And for someone with my abilities, I have an uncanny knack for not seeing the obvious staring me in the face.”
I read between the lines. “You had no idea. About Celine. About who her father really is.”
“And yet the moment she said something, it made perfect sense.” Michael paused, then tried out the words he’d been avoiding. “I have a sister.”
I caught sight of myself in another mirror. The distortion made my face rounder, my body smaller. I thought of Laurel, staring at the swing set. I have a sister, too.
“Down-turned lips, tension in your neck, unfocused eyes seeing something other than the here and now.” Michael paused. “You went to see your sister today, and no amount of Townsend Baby Daddy Drama can make you forget what you saw.”
We hit the end of the house of mirrors and stepped back out onto the boardwalk. I bit back my response to Michael’s statement when I saw Celine waiting for us. She was holding a fishbowl.
“Sloane won you a goldfish,” Michael commented.
“Sloane won all of us goldfish,” Celine corrected. “Girl is crazy good at carnival games. Something about ‘doing the math.’”
I did some math of my own and decided that whether Michael wanted to or not, he needed to talk to Celine. And I needed to get away from the mirrors and the memories and the sudden reminder that the next Fibonacci date was
less than thirty-six hours away.
I found Sloane sitting near the Ferris wheel, surrounded by goldfish in bowls. I sat down beside her. Whatever conversation Michael and Celine were having was drowned out by the music accompanying the Ferris wheel’s turns.
The wheel is turning, I heard a tiny voice whisper in my memory, round and round…
Beside me, Sloane was humming. At first, I thought she was humming along to the music, but then I realized that she was humming the same seven notes, over and over.
Laurel’s song.
Goose bumps rose on my arms. “Sloane…” I started to ask her to stop, but something about the expression on her face stopped me.
“Seven notes, six unique.” Sloane stared at the Ferris wheel, watching it turn. “E-flat, E-flat, E, A-flat, F-sharp, A, B-flat.” She paused. “What if it’s not a song? What if it’s a code?”
