Page 110 of Terms + Conditions
My best friend’s eyes light up, looking around the group. “Wait, Michaela left him?”
“About two months ago,” Nick says. “She’s been Eat, Pray, Loving it all over Europe since.”
I toss the envelope onto the table between me and Finn, and the other envelope displays itself beneath it. When I scramble to hide it, I notice the item that falls out of Michaela’s envelope—her locket. The same one Finn helped me pick out for her eighteenth birthday present.
“Is that her locket?” Finn reaches for it, but I grab it first.
“Yeah, David has been holding it hostage since she left,” I say.
Sunlight reflects off the silver heart dangling from the small chain. I hate that she’s been without it for so long, Michaela has worn this thing every day since she got it. Normally, I would have asked Nick for help picking out a gift; he was far better with that sort of thing, but he was dealing with Aunt Evie’s death, and I didn’t want to bother him. So, I went to Finn, and we swore never to tell Michaela otherwise she’d throw it straight in the garbage. That was before she fell in love with him. “His campaign manager made her take it off because it didn’t go with the aesthetic they were creating for the wife of the future congressman.”
“I wondered where it was the night of the Valentine’s Day dinner,” Finn says, and all heads turn toward him. I’m pretty sure I just gave myself whiplash. Did he just say they saw each other on Valentine’s Day?
“What Valentine’s Day dinner?” Alex asks.
“Oh, we were at the same event and ran into each other.”
“And you’re just now telling me this?” My voice raises slightly. How could he not tell me about this? Why didn’t Mic tell me?
“Nothing happened.” Finn shrugs as if it’s no big deal. “I don’t think we said two words to each other. David made sure of that.”
“Did Nina know about this?” I ask Nick.
“Don’t think so.” Nick shrugs. “ She and MJ have only started talking again after she left him.” Nick chuckles, seeing Finn’s face, a big ol’what the fuckdisplayed front and center. “David didn’t want her involved with Nina. Told her that our family is plain and Nina was holding her back.”
“He’s such an ass,” Alex mumbles under his breath.
“Here’s to never seeing that asshole again.” I lift my beer in the air between us, and they join me in cheering. After a long sip of my beer, I stand from my chair to call my sister and tell her the good news.
I make my way to my office and she answers just before her voicemail picks up. She is relieved to find out she no longer has the looming David cloud over her. It even makes her more excited to come home in a few days, but then she starts to fill me in on the gossip in the vineyard, and I stop listening. My focus returns to the other envelope on my desk—inside, my own fate. My fingers toy with the edges, I consider opening it to see what all it says, but I stuff it into the top drawer of my desk instead.
“Please tell me he sent the locket,” Michaela begs.
“He did.”
She breathes a sigh of relief. “Can you mail it to me?”
“Mail it to you? Are you insane, MJ?.”
Absolutely not. I am not overnighting her locket toItaly. Michaela’s final stop on her European getaway was the vineyard owned by Romy’s boyfriend, Enzo, in Estranei. Do you know how much that would cost? Not to mention, it probably wouldn’t make it before she left to come home anyway.
“You’re going to be home in a few days! You can get it then.”
“Bub, come on!” Michaela whines.
“No.” I slam my desk drawer closed. “It will never make it in time. You’ve waited this long, a few more days won’t hurt you.”
CHAPTER FIFTY-FIVE
NOW
“HOW IS BRIE DOING?” Elizabeth asks when I find her in my office at our Winchester home. There are three sealed moving boxes near the door and another one at her feet, filled almost to the brim with things from the shelves along the back wall. The movers come in two hours to load everything up and drive it down to Jupiter. My office is the last thing that needs to be packed. We put the house on the market at the end of January and received a full offer two days later. We signed our part of the paperwork this morning, and the sale is scheduled to close in two days, on February 25th, Michaela’s birthday. My sister and Finn are coming into town tomorrow so we can celebrate and they plan on scoping out a potential wedding venue. Why she has gone straight to St. Patrick’s Cathedral in New York, I’ll never understand. That’s where they’re going to end up anyway.
“She’s asking when we’ll be home so she can come by,” I say, putting together two more boxes that can be used to pack up my desk and the remainder of the shelves. “She wants to plan out her room.”
Since we took Brie home the day after Ed Brown presented all of the information he had gathered about Juliet, she has been staying there until we could get things straightened out. Justinhad been extremely surprised to see not only his niece but me standing at his front door on New Year’s Day.
The hour-long drive from Jupiter to Justin’s home on the furthest end of Mount Pleasant started normally; everyone was in decent spirits, but as we got closer, the mood shifted little by little until it plummeted the moment we pulled into the driveway of the brick home. We sat in complete silence for two whole minutes before Brie met my gaze in the rearview and, with a whole-body sigh, opened the car door. I couldn’t sleep the night before, tossing and turning with constant thoughts of everything going on. Contemplating the whys and the what-ifs and the how-comes. Too many unanswered questions, and I wasn’t sure Justin could or would tell me the truth.
