“Is someone meeting you?” she asked.

“Yes.”

“Who?”

I hesitated, because I was standing at the edge of the thing I had guarded most carefully in all the world.

For three years, I had kept one entire part of my life sealed away from the Sterling family — away from my father’s jokes, away from Chloe’s comparisons, away from every dinner that turned my choices into evidence in a trial I had never agreed to stand.

But hiding, I realized, had stopped being protection some time ago.