Strong was never a word anyone had applied to me.
I had to get out of the Constantine compound. Now. Three seconds ago.
The champagne glass in my hand was empty, and I handed it to a waiter, not waiting to answer his polite question about having more of the expensive bubbly. If I opened my mouth too wide I was afraid, well, not afraid as much as I was sure,absolutely surethat I would ruin not just this night. But everything—the whole spider web keeping my sister and me safe would be torn apart. So I kept my mouth shut as I pushed past Tinsley Constantine.
“Are you all right, Poppy?” Tinsley asked. We weren’t close, me and Tinsley. The Constantine children breathed rarified air, and when I was around them, I felt all the arrows of my circumstances. We’d been raised as cousins of a sort, but we all knew that was a lie. Now, since leaving college, I was staying in their pool house. And they never intentionally made me feel bad, but I could tell they didn’t like how much their mother cared about me.
And they really didn’t love me staying in the pool house.
“I’m fine,” I said with what I hoped was a smile. I could see across the room Winston and Perry, Caroline’s sons, tracking this conversation. And more eyes were not what I needed. “I just need some air.”
They were one hundred percent pitying me and barely hiding it.
I was one hundred percent freaking out and barely hiding it.
The front doors were still open, people walking in and out, and the big veranda would be just as crowded as this ballroom, so I followed a server out the door and through a wood-panelled study full of men in tuxedos.
I didn’t look at their faces. In this world, this place, they all looked the same. White, slightly saggy, watery-eyes behind glasses that assessed my worth as I went running past.
In my desperation, I got turned around inside the sprawling mansion and found myself in the small sitting room being used as a bar for the catering staff. The same room where Caroline had changed my life forever—god, was that... Christmas? How had my life changed so dramatically in a few months?
“You have to listen to me,” Caroline said, sitting next to me on the little settee facing the icy window. The white twinkle lights reflected in her eyes. “This is serious. And this is hard. But you’re not a little girl anymore.”
“I know,” I said. I’d turned 20 in the spring. And now that Dad was dead, I was Zilla’s legal guardian. Frankly, I hadn’t been a little girl since Mom died. I wasn’t sure I’d ever felt like a little girl.
“Your father...” Caroline took a deep breath. “There’s no money, Poppy.”
“For what?” I asked.
“There’s no money for you. For school. For Zilla. You need to sell the house to pay off what he owed.”
“Okay,” I felt the ground shifting under my feet. “The life insurance—”
“He cashed it out a year ago.”
“My college fund?”
“Gone. The money from your mother’s estate. All gone. There’s nothing, Poppy.”
“How will I pay for Zilla—”
“You’re going to need to drop out of school, and we need to figure something out.”
“You all right, miss?” a server asked while trying to get by me with a tray of empty glasses from the kitchen.
“Bad place to stop,” a guy said, lifting his tray of full glasses over my head as he went by.
“I just need... fresh air.”
“The front—”
“And privacy.”
The server nodded once, her no-nonsense ponytail swishing over her dark vest. “Follow me,” she said.
Maybe I could get a job as a server with this catering company. She probably made good money. I didn’t have any experience serving appetizers on trays, and probably way too much experience eating them. But I could learn. Probably.
We were through the kitchen and down another hall, and finally she pushed open a door to a small brick patio with a few chairs around what looked like a fire pit. I could see the swimming pool beyond. The pool house where I’d been staying since Christmas like some very unwanted guest. The gazebo. Tennis courts. The manicured lawns slipped down over the hills to the shadowed tree line. Fresh air abounded. The sounds of the party were muffled.