Page 98 of No One But Us

“I figured you knew,” I whisper.

“People who knew him far better than I are shocked. How could I have known?”

“I also didn’t really think you’d care,” I admit, and my voice begins to break.

He pauses. “No matter what else is going on in my life,” he finally says, “you’re still my daughter, and I love you.”

As it turns out, the network has given him his job back. This, more than anything else, probably explains his sudden change of attitude and the fact that he’s finally invited me to his wedding. He’s already sold the wedding photos to a tabloid, so I have a feeling this is going to be a part of his image-rehabilitation campaign, which I really want nothing to do with.

Then again, by November, an all-expenses-paid trip to Grand Cayman with my boyfriend might be pretty appealing.

It feels as if the world is finally beginning to shift the right way, that all the pieces are falling into place. Things looked so grim at the start of the summer—and they were grim—but I’d forgotten this: it only takes one bright thing to light up the darkness. And that thing, for me, was James. He more than makes up for anything I’ve lost.

Chapter 59

ELLE

“You’re going to chicken out,” James tells Ginny, saying what all of us think but aren’t brave enough to speak aloud.

She snorts. “You know a lot less than you think you do. I’m going upstairs to call him right now.”

Ginny decided to break up with Alex weeks ago, after she cheated on him the second time, but insisted she couldn’t do it until he was back in the US.

“You just can’t do that to someone,” she said, as if he was a soldier deployed to Afghanistan instead of a Princeton sophomore hanging out in Barcelona on his parents’ dime. I think we all assumed it was Step One of a strategy tentatively titled “Don’t Ever Break Up with Alex.”

We wait, expecting her to come downstairs sheepish and excuse-laden. Instead she comes down enraged.

“He’s an asshole,” she hisses.

“What’s the matter?” I ask.

“He cheated on me!” she shouts. “He cheated on me with some bitch from Stanford!”

“Uh, Ginny, you cheated on him too,” I remind her.

“Yeah, but he slept with her!” she shouts. “That’s different! And I asked him if he would have told me if I hadn’t broken up with him, and he said, ‘Probably not.’ He could have given me a disease!”

“Uh, Ginny, you slept with someone else, too,” I say, trying not to laugh.

Max steps forward with an odd, pinched look to his face. “You slept with someone?” he asks quietly.

She puts her hands on her hips, suddenly defensive. “So?”

“I can’t believe you’d do something like that,” he says.

For a moment I assume he must be joking. But his voice isn’t teasing. It’s rife with disappointment, like she cheated on him.

She rounds on him. “Seriously? You, the biggest whore in the tri-state area, are acting disappointed in me?”

“I thought you had more self-control than that,” he says coolly.

“You spent the whole summer buying me sex toys and talking about how I needed to ‘bloom’ sexually!” she protests. “So what’s with the attitude?”

“It was a joke! I didn’t think you were actually going to do it!” he seethes.

She laughs. “How unbelievably sexist. Why would you hold me to a different standard than you hold yourself?”

“Because I thought you were a better person than that!” he shouts. “I thought you were a better person than me.”