Page 109 of Love and Other Champagne Problems

“Listen, am I disappointed in you for ruining all the desserts at the wedding and getting thrown out?” Destelle turned around. “Of course not. But you could’ve at least saved me a cupcake.”

“The icing tasted like chemicals. You wouldn’t have been impressed.”

“I fly all the way from California, and I didn’t get a cupcake.”

“I’ll buy you one,” I said, and then reality sunk back in. “Someday.”

Well, that was a mood killer.

Destelle shifted on her feet, looking around Nancy’s house. “I haven’t been in here inyears,” she murmured, walking up to one of the shelves and looking at the knickknacks. “That time we came senior year to swim in her pond was probably the only time.”

I slipped my hands into the pockets of my dress pants—because I still had nothing else to change into—and watched her. “Feels like a lifetime ago.”

And in a way, it was. We’d both been different people back then, but when I thought back to the type of girl I’d been senior year, it felt like a different life entirely. An alternate timeline, a different reality. When my future still had been everything I dreamed, not yet taken away.

Destelle’s thoughts seemed to be moving along the same lines. She reached out and traced her finger across a picture frame of Nancy standing in front of the Alderton-Du Ponte building. “Do you regret what you did last night?” Destelle asked in a soft voice. “Since it made your parents… you know.”

“Cut me off?” I finished for her. “No. I don’t regret it. In fact, I… I don’t know a different time I would’ve done it.”

“I am proud of you. I don’t know if I could’ve done it.”

“Youdiddo it.”

She shook her head. “We already talked about how different it was for me. Me pushing the envelope wouldn’t have led to my world completely falling apart; back then, it just felt like it. You pushing the envelope, though… Yeah.”

Last night, I hadn’t so much as pushed the envelope as torn straight through it. “Yeah.”

“Nancy would’ve been proud of you, too.”

Yesterday, I’d had a hard time conjuring Nancy’s voice in my head, but now, I could hear her plain as day. “She’d say ‘took you long enough.’”

“‘I knew you had it in you.’”

“‘I guess you are smarterthan you look.’”

We both grinned at each other, though the melancholy tone still clung to me like a second skin. We were quiet for a moment, both of us mulling over everything that’d happened in that silence. “What are you going to do, then?”

“Get a job, probably. Know anyone hiring?”

“I meant about Sumner.”

I frowned. “How do you know what happened with Sumner?”

“Uh, I thinkeveryoneknows what happened. Mrs. Astor has a loud voice when she’s angry.”

So Aaron had been telling the truth about Vivienne ripping my parents a new one. That was more than mildly satisfying.

But… Sumner. That was another thing that felt like a lifetime ago, being in Sumner’s arms. It hadn’t even been a full day. I thought of all the things I said to him last night, thought of the truth uncovered. I wanted to stick my head in the sand, to add him to the list of things I didn’t want to face, not yet. “If someone does something stupid,” I began, turning my attention out toward the back door, “does that make them a bad person?”

“Depends on the motive behind something stupid. We’re talking about Sumner, right?”

“Not him. Me.”

“You?”

My words grew quiet. “I shouldn’t have flipped the dessert table. As mad as I was, I shouldn’t have done it.”

It’d felt good in the moment, and even in the early stages of the aftermath, it’d felt sweet. But now, in the stark light of day, I saw how truly poor of a decision it was.

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