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“Mmm hmm. Not a stalker, and oh, by the way, her name is Cinderella. ” she deadpans.

Even as I speak the words, I can hear what she’s hearing. I apologize and leave. I need to be grateful that I at least have her name. I can’t go to every hospital in the area looking for her when I only know her name.

I get back in my car and drive over to John’s restaurant. I park across the street from the building and wait. I can see enough through the windows to know she’s not working.

I wait, turning my car on intermittently for warmth, but I never see her even after the shift is done.

She’s going to the ball, which is only a few days away. If it means standing outside in the cold, waiting for her car to arrive so that I won’t lose a minute with her, then that’s precisely what I will do.

CHAPTER 10

Carina

“Thanks again for giving me a ride. Alex said he could send Reggie, but that’s just weird,” I say.

“What’s so weird about it?” Odessa asks as she merges into traffic. “I’m driving you right now. Pretend I’m some old man, and it’s exactly the same.”

“I don’t know. I mean, it’s not like an Uber, but it’s just strange to me to think that people have someone available to drive them places.”

“Ahem. I’ve been at this for almost an hour now.” Odessa points to herself and then the steering wheel.

“This is different. You’re my friend and you’re doing this out of the kindness of your heart. Plus, you want to see where he lives.”

“Don’t you?” she asks.

“No, why?” I shrug. “It’s just a house.”

“Just a house,” Odessa says. “He’s a billionaire. No way does he live in ‘just a house.’”

As I shrug again, Odessa turns past a stone gate with oversized lanterns onto a small road lined with tall trees and an evergreen box hedge. The trees are bare from winter.

The evergreens clear, giving a view of a perfectly manicured lawn leading to taller trees in the distance.

I never leave the city much, so seeing an area with so much space is always foreign to me.

Everything I do is for my grandmother, and she believes everything we need is within walking distance. I glance at the GPS screen on Odessa’s dashboard.

“Where are we?” I ask. “GPS says we arrived.”

Odessa laughs. “You need to get out of the city more, sis. We’re here, as in on his property.” She points ahead. “There’s his ‘just a house’.”

I look ahead to where the trees part. The road continues, but I don’t see anything I would call a house.

Instead, I see the small road leading to limestone columns, where the road changes from asphalt to a pale stone-designed circle in front of a three-story French chateau-style building three times larger than any house I had ever seen before.

This can’t be a house.

The third floor of the building is dark grey slate, squared off, reminding me of a Tupperware lid with arched windows jutting out from it. The rest of the house is cream-colored limestone, with tall inset windows and Juliet balconies on the second floor.

To the left is a smaller, matching building with five garage doors, and to the right is an attached oval conservatory with a shiny gold-colored roof.

We must have taken a wrong turn somewhere and ended up at a museum. This can’t be a house.

Butterflies swarm in my stomach.

“We need to go,” I say.

“Go? We just got here.” Odessa follows the driveway into the circle that curves towards the home’s entrance.

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