“Are you sure?” she says, in her gentle, cultured voice. “I think Mr. Kenwood was particularly looking forward to meeting me. You know who I am, don’t you?”

“I do,” the second guard says quickly. “I still have my Sports Illustrated with you on the cover.”

Simone gives him her most charming smile. I know she’s just getting us through the gates, but it makes me burn with jealousy to see her looking up at him with those cat-like eyes, her thick lashes fluttering.

“That’s so sweet!” she says. “I wish you had it here. I’d sign it for you.”

“I’ll let Mr. Kenwood know you’re on your way up,” the guard says politely.

“Thank you!” Simone says, blowing him a kiss.

I put the car in drive, barely waiting for the gates to part before I roar through. I can feel the back of my neck burning. Simone is even more gorgeous now than when I knew her. I wonder if I could stand being with her, the way that men drool over her everywhere she goes. Those guards couldn’t keep their jaws shut. It made me want to jump out of the car and beat the shit out of both of them. And Simone’s not even mine.

Doesn’t matter. That’s not an option anymore.

Simone made it pretty clear nine years ago how she feels about me.

I’m not ever giving her another chance to rip my heart out and stomp on it. I barely survived the last time.

We speed up to the house. Simone lets out a little gasp when she sees it. I don’t think she’s impressed—the place is just outrageous. It’s the most ostentatious mansion I’ve ever seen. It looks like it would be better suited to Bel Air than Chicago.

It’s a white Greco-Roman monstrosity, like three mansions stacked on top of each other. A jumble of pillars and scrolls, archways and pass-throughs. The semi-circular driveway centers around a gargantuan fountain, bigger than the Trevi fountain in Rome. Water spurts from the mouths of dolphins, while several mermaids cling to the burly arms and legs of King Triton.

I pull up next to the fountain so the valet can take my keys.

“Oh my god,” Simone whispers, getting out of the car.

“Welcome,” the valet says. “Head through the main level. The party is throughout the house and on the back grounds.”

More cars are pulling in behind us. Each one is a super-car worth $250k or more. Some kid who looks all of twenty-one climbs out of a Lamborghini. He’s dressed in a tropical-printed silk shirt and matching trousers, with about twenty gold chains slung around his neck. He’s wearing mirrored sunglasses despite the fact that it’s ten o’clock at night.

“I don’t think this is going to be my kind of party,” I say to Simone.

“What’s your kind of party?” she asks me, eyebrow raised.

“Well . . .” Now that I think about it, I guess no kind of party.

“Maybe a pint of Guinness, an hour at the batting cages, and a drive along the lakeshore,” Simone says, with a small smile.

That would be the perfect day for me.

It disturbs me how easily Simone listed that off. Just like how she remembered my preferences in coffee. It makes me feel raw and exposed.

Sometimes I tell myself that the intense connection I felt to Simone was all in my mind. That it couldn’t have been real, or she never would have left.

Then she proves that she really did understand me, and that fucks with my head. It fucks with the story I told myself to explain how she could cut me off so easy.

I know I’m glowering at her. I can tell by the way she shrinks back from me, the smile fading off her face.

“Let’s go in the house,” I say.

“Sure,” Simone replies in a small voice.

I don’t take her arm, but I stick close to her as we enter Kenwood’s mansion. The lights are low, and I don’t know who’s going to be here.

The music is loud and thudding, shaking the walls and rattling the art on the walls. While the exterior of the house is faux-antique, the interior is all fluorescent pop-art, Lucite furniture, pinball machines, and gaudy sculptures that look like giant red lips, glittery guitars, and chrome balloon animals.

The guests are equally garish. Half the outfits would look more at home at a circus than a party, but I see enough brand-names to know it’s all expensive.

“Is this what’s fashionable now?” I mutter to Simone.

“I guess, if you’ve got the money for it,” Simone says. She nods her head toward a young woman wearing a skin-tight mini dress and a pair of thigh-high blue fur boots. “Those boots are four thousand dollars. They’re from the Versace fall line that hasn’t even been released yet.”

“Huh. I thought she skinned a Muppet.”

Simone laughs. “Well, expensive doesn’t always mean attractive.”

I remember that Simone wanted to design her own clothes, once upon a time.

“Did you ever end up going to Parsons?” I ask her.

She shakes her head. “No. I never did.”

“Why not?”

“Oh . . .” she sighs. “Work and . . . other things got in the way.”

“Other things” meaning her parents, probably.

“I do make sketches of designs sometimes . . .” Simone says. “I have a whole notebook full of them.”

Without thinking, I say, “I’d like to see them.”

“You would?”

She’s looking up at me with the most heartbreaking expression on her face. Why, why, why the FUCK does she care what I think? I don’t understand her. How can she be so callous with me, and yet so vulnerable?

“We better get going,” I say roughly. “In case those guards really do call Kenwood.”

“Right,” Simone says, dropping her eyes. “Of course.”

The house is packed with partygoers, especially on the main level. Looking out into the backyard, we can see dozens of people lounging around the pool, swimming, or soaking in the hot tub. Some look like they fell in the pool with their clothes on, while others are half or fully naked.

The whole place reeks of alcohol. There’s liquor absolutely everywhere, plus a cornucopia of party drugs, right out in the open. I see a group of young women mixing up a bowlful of pills, then taking a handful each and washing it down with cognac.

Some of the girls look extremely young. Especially the ones hired to work the party. They’re dressed like guests, in mini-dresses, crop tops, booty shorts, and heels, but it’s clear from the way they prowl the party, finding older men and sitting down in their laps, that they’ve been hired as entertainment.

Simone watches them, frowning.

“How old do you think they are?” she says, looking at one particularly youthful redhead with her hair in pigtails.

“I have no idea,” I say. “Kenwood definitely has a reputation. I’m guessing he wouldn’t be stupid enough to bring in anybody under eighteen here in the city. But they say when he flies guests out to his boat . . . he brings in girls as young as twelve.”

“That makes me want to throw up,” Simone says coldly.

“I agree.”

“I had three aunts,” she says, quietly. “My father’s older sisters. They thought they were getting jobs as maids. Then they disappeared. Tata thinks they might have been trafficked. He looked for them for years, but never found them. That’s why he started the Freedom Foundation.”