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The Hastings arrived at the barbecue in three separate cars, each worth more than a year's tuition at a private liberal arts college, which was the first warning sign that things had taken a turn for the shitty.

Blake, upon hearing that his ex-girlfriend's parents were in the vicinity, promptly attempted to strangle himself with the ties on his novelty bikini-girl apron. At least, that's what it looked like he was doing, given how violently he was struggling to get the thing off.

"Calm down," I snapped as I tried to undo the knots with my fingernails. "Would you stop moving? You're going to choke yourself."

He let out a single panicked laugh.

"That's a great idea, actually. Quick. No one's looking."

I huffed and smacked him on the back of the head.

Ugh. His hair's softer than mine. How's that fair?

"Don't joke like that," I told him. "It's not funny. And what am I missing? What's so bad about Alissa's dad?"

"It's not her dad," Blake said, shaking his head. "It's her mom and dad together. They're—"

They're here. On the back porch. Right now.

I'd missed the first warning sign. The second was that Alissa's mother looked like an Instagram model. She was a walking embodiment of the sponsored post on your feed that you don't really want to see because it reminds you that your last vacation was spent on your couch and also you are, in the grand scheme of things, not very pretty. Her hair was dark and blown out in perfect curls, and her eyeliner was so sharp it could've slit a man's throat.

She didn't smile, and she'd brought her own bottle of rosé and didn't look like she was going to share it.

I hated her.

But I respected the aesthetic.

Then there was the last red flag of the day. Alissa's father, the founder and owner of Hasting's Yachts, had shown up to a casual family barbeque wearing white linen pants, a white button-down shirt, crocodile leather shoes and three different Rolex watches. He barely came up to my shoulder when we stood on level ground, but he had the ego and the bank account of LeBron James, so he carried himself like he was closer to seven feet tall than to four.

Standing between them on the back porch was Alissa, whose face was blank in a way that screamed I am dissociating.

Jesse and Lena's mother, Boss—who was both the host of the party and the boldest and bravest matriarch at the family barbecue—welcomed the Hastings without batting an eyelash.

"Penelope!" I heard her greet Alissa's mother, just loud enough for me to hear from across the year. "You look great. I haven't seen you around in months! What've you been up to?"

"I've been doing business abroad," Penelope replied shortly.

She had an Italian accent. Of course she had an Italian accent.

"Well, we're glad you could make it," Boss said, smile unwavering as she turned her attention to Alissa's father. "And you must be Santiago! It's wonderful to finally meet you. I feel like I know you already—your daughter's told me so much about you."

Santiago Hastings cocked one eyebrow.

"Has she?" he drawled.

Blake was still very tense beside me, despite the fact that he was no longer wearing an apron with cartoon boobs on it, and had resorted to giving his undivided attention to the grill.

"You're going to burn the burgers," I whispered.

He hummed noncommittally.

"Blake," I whispered again, and set my hand on his bicep.

The tension in his shoulder eased almost immediately (which was kind of flattering and made my heart feel all melty). He leaned into my touch and sighed.

"Her parents suck," he grumbled.

I scoffed, and because I was both painfully oblivious to all the ominous warning signs and blissfully optimistic, I squeezed Blake's arm and said, "They can't possibly be that bad."

So I totally fucking jinxed it, I guess.

Boss called us all to come take a seat at the two folding tables that'd been set up end to end across the length of the back porch. There was enough food to feed half of Holden—turkey wraps and chicken wings and zucchini fries and pie and chocolate chip cookies and grilled vegetables and burgers and hot dogs and literally every variation of salad that I could think of—and the whole set-up was large enough that we probably could've seated twenty people comfortably.

This all proved deeply ironic, given that there were just thirteen of us and we somehow managed to achieve the exact opposite of a comfortable dining experience.

Blake and I had to make two trips to the table to transport all the platters of meat and grilled vegetables. On our return lap, halfway back to the grill, he started dragging his feet a little. I shot him a look—an eyebrows-raised, you good? kind of look—and he responded by grimacing like he might actually throw up.

"Sit next to me," he whispered, in a tone that suggested this was life or death and not hot dog or hamburger. "Please."

I chuckled, in a way that retrospectively makes me want to kick myself in the face just a tiny bit, and bumped my hip against his.

"Of course," I said.

But by the time we got back to the porch, everyone else had taken a seat and started filling up their paper plates. Two chairs remained. They were at a diagonal across the table from each other—not far, given the size of the table, but still not, like, together. Blake and I exchanged a quick glance before taking these seats. I was a bit disappointed. Blake, on the other hand, looked like the world had come to an end.

I watched him slump in his chair and wished, more than ever, that I had a cell phone so we could communicate privately. He looked like he could use a meme.

"Dig in, everybody!" Boss informed the table.

And so the barbecue began—memeless, and with a great deal of obvious discomfort for the majority of parties involved.

I sat at the center on one side of the table.

To my right, George and Aunt Rachel debated the pros and cons of using different brands of waterproof exterior paint on window trim—a topic so obscure and mundane that I was sure they'd started talking about the first thing they could come up with just to break the awkward silence. Across from them sat Gummer, who was listening far too intently to their paint debate. Then there was Blake, who'd consumed four glasses of sweet tea in quick succession out of sheer discomfort.

To my left, Isabel—still dressed in Lena's old taekwondo outfit—jumped between the laps of Jesse and Chloe, who were comparing notes on schools in the district. Across from the future PTA stars sat Lena and Boss. They polished off seven cheeseburgers, between mother and daughter, and then started off on the potato salad.

Directly across from me sat Alissa, who kept one hand shielded over her manicured eyebrows and squinted like the sun was blinding, even though it was so overcast I was half expecting it to rain.

I could see it in her posture; she was mortified.

Her parents clearly hadn't come to the barbecue together because they wanted some quality family time. Penelope and Santiago had chosen to sit at the opposite ends of the table, facing each other, and did little else but glare and set down their plastic cutlery with unnecessary force for the sheer dramatic effect.

Everyone at the table felt the heat of their mutual hatred and was withering under it, unsure what to do. Twice, Boss tried to start a table-wide conversation to cut through the awkwardness.

Twice, she failed.

Then Chloe tried her hand.

"I absolutely love your dress, Penelope," she gushed.

"Thank you," Alissa's mother replied, eyes fixed resolutely on her ex-husband. "It's Versace."

She took a long sip of rosé and said nothing else.

Emboldened by this tiny measure of progress, Gummer turned to Santiago and attempted some similar small talk.

"So, you're in the boating business, I hear," he said.

"Yachting," Santiago corrected brusquely, then turned to fix the glare he'd been giving his wife onto Gummer. "I hear that your son is dating my daughter."

Beside me, Jesse gasped. Then he coughed. Then he made a gagging noise. When I turned to see what the matter was, his face was red, his eyes were filled with tears, and he had a wet grape in his palm.

"Jesse," I crinkled my nose, "what the heck?"

"I think I inhaled this," he wheezed, then set the grape back on his plate very gingerly.

"Daddy—" Alissa groaned.

"It's true, isn't it?" Santiago insisted.

Gummer looked to Jesse, who was a bit red but had managed to dislodge the grape from his windpipe, and then back at the short, leathery man at the end of the table.

"Well, yes," he admitted, "I think they're, uh, hanging out."

"And your son," Santiago began, looking Jesse up and down. "He's a senior this year, too, I presume. What's his sport? Has he had any scholarship offers yet?"

There was a brief silence as we all marinated in the utter misogyny of such an inquiry and wondered how to proceed.

"He surfs," Boss finally spoke up from the other end of the table. "They don't have a team at the school, but Jesse's really good. He's been surfing since he was five years old."

Penelope laughed, and it was exactly the kind of laugh you'd imagine belongs to a woman who's getting hammered by herself at a family barbecue while her ex-husband brings the drama.

"He won't be happy unless our daughter's future husband plays football at Miami," she informed us all. "Never mind that our tiny Tigo can't catch a ball to save his life. He likes to think himself an athlete because he watches every game. Isn't that adorable?"

Lena and I locked eyes over the table.

Our expressions were identical, and could be best described as yikes.jpg.

"Mom, please," Alissa begged. "Enough."

"I'm simply saying," Penelope pressed on, "that you don't need to land a professional athlete. You're young. Enjoy yourself."

Santiago barked out a cruel laugh.

"Oh, I think she's enjoying herself plenty."

All the color drained from Alissa's face.

"What is that supposed to mean?" she asked in a very small voice.

"Well, I heard the Hamilton boy left you for someone else and you were quite broken up about it, but now I see you've found yourself a new toy," Santiago bit out, turning his cruel smile onto his daughter and tilting his head in faux humor. "You are your mother's child, after all."

Several things happened at once.

Rachel, who had the same wide-eyed look she got when shit hit the fan on one of her reality shows, gasped audibly. Blake, who'd just polished off his fifth glass of sweet tea, pushed back his chair and stumbled over an excuse with the word bathroom somewhere in it before darting inside the house and slamming the screen door behind himself. And Jesse, who'd only just recovered from inhaling a grape, flushed an even deeper shade of red than he had during his episode of accidental asphyxiation.

His face contorted in anger.

"Leave her alone!" he snapped at the exact moment that Penelope laughed bitterly and cried, "You miserable bastard!"

Santiago glanced between them.

"So this one has a spine," he said, jerking his chin towards Jesse and laughing. "That's a minor improvement over the last." He tipped his head towards Blake's vacated chair.

Alissa buried her face in her hands.

"Hey now," George said, more amicably and more paternally than anyone else at the table could manage.

Santiago just cackled again.

It'd somehow turned into the exact opposite of a relaxing afternoon between friends and family. Of course, I'd never been to a barbecue before, so maybe this was normal—the backhanded compliments, the accusations of moral debauchery, the sinking feeling that the party wouldn't be over until someone got slapped.

"Mr. Hastings," George began again, sounding far less patient and amicable now, "I think it's time for you to go."

Santiago's eyes narrowed.

"Excuse me?" he demanded.

I saw what happened next out of the corner of my eye, for the most part. At the other end of the table, Penelope downed the last bit of rosé in her plastic cup, poured herself a refill, then stood abruptly, knocking her chair back, before tossing the full cup across the length of the table with a precision and grace that could've made Tom Brady fall to his knees and shed a tear.

The cup collided with her ex-husband's chest, its contents splattering across his crisp white shirt and pants, staining them like a Jackson Pollock.

Isabel, who was propped up on Chloe's knee, cackled.

"Mom!" Alissa cried. "Oh my god, would you chill?"

Santiago wiped a single drop of rosé from his cheek.

"See, mija? This is where you get your dramatics," he said evenly. Then, with a surprising amount of pride for a man covered in the drink of choice of nine out of ten Real Housewives, he stood from the table and stormed inside the house.

Thirty seconds later, we heard a car engine roar to life.

"Good riddance," Penelope murmured. The smile that curled the ends of her lips was wicked.

I glanced across the table at Alissa. Her hands covered either side of her face as she hunched over her plate full of untouched food, so I was the only person at the table who could see the anguish on her face. It was more than just humiliation. It was the kind of pain a child feels when her parents have let her down, irredeemably and unapologetically.

I knew what that looked like, because I'd felt it.

So when Alissa stood abruptly and tore down the porch steps and across the lawn, I slapped my napkin onto the table and stood, too.

"We should—" Lena began, pushing her chair back.

"Let me talk to her," I said.

Lena scrutinized me for a moment, looking torn.

"Don't be funny," she advised me. "She's got no sense of humor when she's upset. You've gotta compliment her hair and then remind her she got a 5 on the AP Bio exam and—"

"Lena," I interrupted, "I've got this."

She pressed her lips together tightly and nodded.

I turned and padded down the porch steps.

Alissa was already across the yard, sitting on the ledge of the bean-shaped pool with her feet in the water and her back to the house. I marched across the grass, dew splashing my bare ankles, and tried to think of an opening line that wasn't a joke. Which was tough, because humor was kind of my go-to coping method.

Alissa sighed and sniffled when she heard my footsteps approaching. I plopped down on the cobblestone pavement with all the grace of a wet sponge, scooted forward until I was sitting next to her, and threw off my flip-flops to stick my feet in the water.

The pool was cold—way too cold to be enjoyable, much less comfortable, given the overcast skies and cool breezes.

"This weather sucks," I blurted.

Nailed it, I thought. Just absolute slam dunk. Home run. Everyone else go home.

I fought the urge to dunk my head in the pool and inhale.

But beside me, Alissa barked out a laugh.

"It's the worst," she spat, kicking her foot out and splashing water across the width of the pool. Her toenails were painted robin's egg blue, the color the sky should've been. "Fuck this whole tropical storm thing. It's August, right? Like, where's the fucking sun?"

"Yeah," I agreed quickly, because she seemed pretty fired up.

"The whole reason I spent the summer here instead of taking bogus art history classes in Madrid was so I could enjoy it." She punctuated this with a kick of her heel against the surface of the pool, sprinkling us with a few drops of chlorinated water that dotted Alissa's cobalt blue romper and also landed directly in my left eye, because that's just the way things go for me.

"You could've gone to Madrid?" I cried, sounding a bit more alarmed than I actually was because—hello, chlorine. In my eye.

"Yeah," she grumbled in response. "My mom knows a professor at some university there. She had an affair with him, I guess, and she was gonna blackmail him into letting me enroll late. I think his wife is, like, important in politics, or something. Whatever. So, yeah, I was going to spend the summer in Madrid, but then—then I started hooking up with Ethan, and my mom got mad."

Alissa shrugged, as if this was a perfectly common chain of events that could happen to any high schooler.

"Your mom's kind of awesome," I said without thinking.

Then, with the kind of sudden burst of panic that you might feel after stepping on an upturned thumbtack or closing your front door and realizing your keys are on the kitchen table, I remembered that Alissa had told me she'd liked hooking up with Ethan for the sole reason that her mom had been mad enough about it to talk to her for the first time in four months.

"I mean," I hurried, "awful. She's just the worst."

Alissa sighed and offered me a half-smile. I guess she'd gotten used to my foot-in-mouth routine.

"She's my mom," she replied with a shrug. "I mean, I guess I love her. You're supposed to love your mom, right? But... I wish, sometimes, that she was better at it."

She admitted this last bit in a very quiet voice, and followed up by clearing her throat and gathering chunks of her long, pin-straight hair over one shoulder. She flared the tips in front of her face, examining them for nonexistent split ends.

A hard breeze whisked across the yard, ruffling the grass.

It was cold. Not Alaska mid-winter cold, but still.

"My parents are divorced," I said suddenly, staring ahead at the water in the pool and twisting a bit of fabric at the hem of my dress. "I think my dad cheated. But sometimes I think—I think I forgive him. Which is awful, because, like, he cheated. But my mom—" I swallowed a lump in my throat and laughed weakly, "—my mom is a nightmare. She bags groceries. Like, that's it. That's her career. She's thirty-four years old, and she bags groceries, and she buys lotto cards. My grandparents had money. They put her through school, and they paid all her tuition when she got into Northwestern. But she dropped out sophomore year, because she just—she doesn't do anything."

Alissa was quiet for a long moment.

"My mom's on her ninth marriage," she finally said.

"I think my mom's sleeping with her manager at Whole Foods," I replied.

"Pretty sure my dad's company smuggles cocaine from Cuba."

"I'm pretty sure my dad does cocaine."

"My mom has told me—on multiple occasions—that she regrets having me because I messed up her modeling career."

"Nobody's ever helped me with my homework," I admitted. "I failed Physics my freshman year. I had to take summer classes. And you don't even want to know how bad AP Bio kicked my ass last year."

Alissa sighed, then mumbled, "I got a 5."

"I got a 2. A 2! I don't even get college credit for my suffering."

She laughed. And I laughed, too, because all these things seemed smaller now that we'd laid them out side by side.

I knew talking about things didn't change them. My parents still weren't what I wanted them to be, and they probably never would be. I still dreaded going home to Alaska, even though I had an impending return flight and one last year of high school to finish before I got to flee the state and never look back. I'd still gotten a 2 in AP Bio and couldn't go five minutes without saying something I regretted.

These things were true.

But I'd be alright. I had Aunt Rachel, who had tried, unlike either of my parents. I had Jesse and Lena, who'd shown me, for better and for worse, what I was missing as an only child. I had Alissa—the kind of girl I thought I hated, with her perfect hair and overflowing confidence—who'd proved to be a lot more like me than I'd ever thought possible. And I had Blake. I had a boyfriend. And he was patient when I rambled, and he was actually quite funny when you got past the social awkwardness he'd buried beneath mountains of broodingly handsome glaring, and he always kept my secrets, even at the beginning, when I hadn't trusted him as far as I could throw an empty red Solo cup.

I'd found my people.

And, in spite of everything, we'd be alright.

"You wanna have a belly flop contest?" Alissa asked, nudging my shoulder with hers and beaming in a way that told me she was feeling a lot lighter, too.

I wondered how I'd ever been so wrong about her. I'd thought there was some kind of unspoken competition between us, and that I'd either win (and take home the prize, which was the hot lifeguard next door and bragging rights) or I'd lose (and have to watch the girl with nicer hair and cuter clothes run off into the sunset with him).

I hadn't realized that there was a third option, which was that we stopped pretending we had to hate each other because we had different interests but similar taste in boys. 

So I said, "Fuck yeah I do."

We both scrambled to our feet, giggling like two twelve-year-olds who'd gotten their hands on their mom's copy of Fifty Shades of Grey and had no idea what they were in for.

And maybe it was the sudden kinship I felt with Alissa that made me say what I said next.

"You know," I told her as we scampered across the patio and into the grass, to get our running starts, "before I got to Florida, I didn't even know how to swim! Isn't that crazy?"

"You couldn't swim?"

The voice wasn't Alissa's.

It was Lena's.

I turned over my shoulder and saw that we'd gotten closer to the back porch than I'd realized. Lena and Jesse were sitting on the steps, both staring up at me with wide, unblinking eyes. Everyone else had heard, too, it seemed, and was staring at me—Rachel, Gummer, Boss, George, Chloe, Penelope (the rosé was gone, but she was not) and even Isabel (who, to be fair, probably didn't give a shit if I could swim and was just watching because she thought Alissa and I were going to take a running leap into the pool and make big splashy).

I glanced back at Alissa. She was frowning at me like I'd just told her I ran a Twitter account dedicated to posting overzealously graphic Fifty Shades fan art.

It was happening.

The thing I'd had nightmares about was actually happening.

They knew. Everyone knew that I couldn't swim, and they were looking at me the way I'd always known they would. Outsider, their eyes said. You don't belong here. What kind of pale, long-armed, flat-haired, lopsided-breasted creature crawled off the plane from Alaska and thought she could go unnoticed in Holden? What made her think she could walk in here and pretend we're her friends, her family?

You don't belong here. You don't belong anywhere.

The wave of anxiety I felt was so intense it nearly knocked my feet out from under me. And maybe, if it'd happened at the beginning of the summer, I would've let it. Maybe I would've allowed the roaring in my head to drag me under and drown me.

But not now.

No, I knew how to float.

So I shrugged my shoulders with an easiness I didn't quite feel, and smiled like someone who has nothing to lose, even though it sort of felt like I could lose everything.

"Nope," I admitted. "But I learned."

Lena was the first to react.

"Oh my god," she said, pinching the bridge of her nose and squeezing her eyes shut. "Oh my god, we took you surfing. In the ocean. Please, Waverly. Please tell me you knew how to swim when we went out there to surf." Her eyes opened, briefly, and then shut again almost immediately when she saw how red my face had turned. "Oh my god, you didn't. Oh, sweet Jesus."

"It was great practice," I insisted, rubbing the nail of my right index finger into the side of my thumb so hard I took off some skin.

I glanced around the yard again.

The realization I came to was long overdue, really. Nobody was staring at me because of the admission that I'd arrived in Holden seventeen years old and unable to swim. They were staring at me because I'd been deeply, fundamentally, atrociously self-conscious, to the point of voluntarily putting myself in an extreme position of peril.

"You idiot!" Lena growled.

Yeah. Yeah, that was fair.

I shrugged again, feeling very small and very young suddenly.

The incredulous look on Lena's face slipped. She frowned at me for a moment, like she was trying to fit together puzzle pieces, and then began shaking her head. Lena pushed herself up from the porch and took three long strides across the grass.

"You idiot," she sighed, throwing her arms around my neck and hugging me so tightly I wheezed. "I would've been your friend, you know. Even if you'd told me."

I buried my face against her shoulder, humiliated.

"It was embarrassing," I said very quietly.

She laughed hard, and I felt it rattle in her chest. I threw my arms around her, too, and squeezed. She squeezed back, a little harder, and I quickly ditched any thoughts of engaging in a hugging contest. It sort of felt like I was a first grader trying to arm wrestle John Cena.

It just wasn't gonna work out in my favor.

Lena finally released me and stepped back.

"You could've told us, Waverly," Jesse piped up from beside his sister, offering me a lopsided smile. "I mean, it's not that big a deal, but Blake and I are both trained lifeguards. We could've—"

He stopped, abruptly, his mouth still hanging open as he blinked.

Oh no.

"Wait," he drawled, narrowing his eyes at me.

Oh no.

"He knew. Blake knew," Jesse concluded. Then he gasped and beamed at me. "He was teaching you, wasn't he? That's why he kept sneaking out of the house and going to the pool! He was teaching you!"

I tried not to make eye contact with Blake's parents.

Oh my god, if they knew how many hours I'd spent staring at their son's bare chest—

"He what?" Chloe snapped.

For one short and terrifying second, I thought her sudden burst of anger was directed at me.

Then Blake stepped out onto the porch, as if summoned to return from his anxiety-driven bathroom break by the sheer willpower of his stepmother's wrath, and I remembered that he'd been grounded for most of the summer.

Well. Oops.

Blake went from cautious, as he glanced towards Santiago's chair, to relieved, seeing as it was now empty. But then he looked up at Chloe and saw that the parental hellfire wasn't over yet, because his tiny, blonde stepmom was staring at him like a warrior Viking goddess preparing to vanquish some dumbass man.

My dumbass man.

"Mrs. Hamilton, it was my fault!" I blurted. "I asked him to!"

But Chloe didn't listen.

"Jesse," she said, eerily calm. "Hold the baby."

He scrambled up the porch stairs and collected Isabel from her outstretched arms. Isabel, delighted by the new development in the chain of events that'd caused the Fletcher's casual backyard barbecue to more accurately resemble the season finale of a Spanish telenovela, twisted wildly in Jesse's arms to watch her half-brother receive what was sure to be the ass whooping of the century.

"He was only helping me!" I insisted. "It's my fault!"

Blake glanced at me, eyes wide in confusion, and then back at his stepmother, who was—luckily for him—stuck on the opposite side of a very long table (which was, unluckily for him, also covered in things she could easily throw at him, should the urge strike her).

"You were grounded," Chloe seethed.

Blake's face sunk.

Yeah, he'd realized what she was all fired up about. For a split second, I saw everything on his face—the sheepishness, the terror, the embarrassment—before he squashed it down and leveled her with a very cold, very bored expression.

"I'm almost eighteen," he said, rolling his eyes and folding his arms across his chest. "I'm not a kid anymore. You can't just ground me. That doesn't mean anything."

"Well, you're still seventeen," Chloe pointed out. "So until your next birthday, you abide by our rules. I made the decision to ground you after you went to that stupid party and left your sister at home. Alone. Completely unattended. If you can't respect my call, then—"

"Then what?" Blake asked, his voice tight.

It was only then that I noticed his hands, which he'd balled into tight fists and shoved under his armpits, were shaking.

This was his greatest fear.

I mean, he'd been a complete asshole to me the first night I'd spent in Holden all because he was worried I'd tell all his friends that I'd seen him get chewed out by his stepmom. We'd wasted so much time being hostile and snapping at each other because of it. And now, here, in front of all his friends, it was happening.

For me, it was déjà vu to the first time we'd met.

"Then you've lost the privilege of having your phone," Chloe said, grinding her teeth together. I winced when she reached across the table and said in a low voice, "Hand it over."

Blake stared down at her hand, manicured fingers arched like claws, and shook his head.

"I'm not giving you my—"

"Blake," she snapped. "Phone. Now."

His eyes drifted. He looked around the porch, where the other parents were watching in tense and solemn silence (save for Penelope, who was chuckling ever so slightly, because I guess that's what one does when one has had an entire fucking bottle of wine to oneself). Then he looked out across the lawn at his friends. At me.

His face flushed red.

He looked very young all of a sudden—young and unsure.

Chloe didn't look much better. There was something wild in her eyes that reminded me what Blake had said, about the fact that she hadn't slept much the last seventy-two hours because Isabel had been fighting the flu. She was probably exhausted. And it wasn't her fault that she didn't have the first clue how to raise a teenage son who'd never asked for a replacement mother.

She was trying.

Trying counted for a lot.

Chloe quirked her eyebrows and glanced down at her empty hand, huffing in impatience. I knew she was just acting so tough on Blake because she had an audience; she didn't want to look like the woman whose stepson walked all over her.

Blake stared at her for a long moment before he shoved his hand into the front pocket of his shorts and dug out his phone.

Chloe exhaled, her shoulders hunching under the intensity of her stepson's glare. She didn't look the least bit triumphant as he dropped his phone into her open palm.

"Thank you," she said.

Blake leveled her with a look so cold it sent a shiver up my back.

"There," he said. "Now you can stop pretending to be my mom."

"Blake!" George exclaimed, standing up in a rush from his seat at the table and fumbling out something about having respect and, in more eloquent terms, not being a total dick to your stepmother.

But the damage had been done.

Chloe flinched, as if Blake had slapped her clear across the face. I watched, completely helpless, as her hand went slack and Blake's phone slipped through her fingers. She tried to catch it—I saw her. I caught the flare of panic in her wide, dark eyes and the little twitch of her arm as she moved to correct the mistake. She didn't do it on purpose.

But it was too late.

Blake's phone plunged into a pitcher of sweet tea.

It went without saying that the party was over.

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