THE CONVERSATION BETWEEN Alton, Suzanna, and Bryce stilled when we entered. I held my breath as my mother closed the door.
“Apparently you forgot to check your watch,” Alton said. “Or is it an issue with telling time?”
“What is this—?”
“Five minutes, Alexandria. Five minutes. It seems a college degree has done little for your ability to follow simple instructions.”
“I was told to play nice and be polite to the guests. That’s what I was doing. You’re not a guest and playing nice isn’t in your repertoire.”
My mother stepped forward. “Alton, we’re here now. I realize this is my fault.”
I narrowed my eyes trying to comprehend the conversation. Her fault?
“Yes, Laide, it is, and we’ll discuss that later.”
My mother shifted as she looked from person to person. Both Suzanna and Bryce met her gaze, but in true Savannah style their expressions revealed nothing.
“Would someone tell me what’s going on?”
Mother led me toward the conference table. It wasn’t as large as a corporate conference table, but it was dark, glossy, and ostentatiously regal. It fit in Alton’s office perfectly. There were four leather chairs on each side and one at each end. The ones at the end had arms and resembled small thrones. When I was little it helped to perpetuate my princess theory. It was probably the table my grandfather had and his father before that. Despite the heritage, I hated that table almost as much as I loathed my bedroom. Each time throughout my childhood when I was caught or accused of wrongdoing, my correction began with a family conference at this table. There were three of us—three. Sitting at this giant-ass table was ridiculous. It was part of Alton’s power play, his demonstration of strength. When I was five, it probably worked. By the time I was old enough to understand overcompensation, I found it humorous.
I stopped walking and laughed. I wasn’t five nor was I seventeen. The Spencers weren’t family, and we weren’t discussing my correction. This was pure bullshit.
My forced laughter filled the room. “Are you all out of your minds?” I moved my outstretched hand toward each person. “What is this? I’m not sitting. I’m not doing anything. And if you want me to go back out to those guests—my guests, ha!… If you want me to go back out there and play the dutiful daughter then someone better answer some damn questions.”
“Alexandria—”
“Alex,” I corrected my mother.
“Alex,” Bryce offered. The years of our friendship rippled through the sound of his voice as he said my name. But that quickly disappeared when I looked at him and remembered the rest of our story, after our friendship.
Bryce had grown up well in the past four years. His shoulders were broader, his chin was defined, and his light blonde hair longer than I remembered. It wasn’t too long, but had a slight wave I’d never noticed when we were younger. He was a swimmer at the academy and had always kept it short. Over the past few years, his lean swimmer’s body had broadened. That wasn’t to say he was heavy. The weight looked good on him, or maybe it was the suit. He definitely looked the part of a Montague minion, all the way to his Italian loafers.
“Hi, Bryce.”
He took a step toward me. “I wish we had more time to explain.”
I shook my head. “Explain what?”
“We have a situation, something that you can help with. Something I’d—we’d—like you to do.”
My mother nodded while Suzanna and Alton shared an expression somewhere between pain and disgust.
I forced another laugh. “A situation? Does this have anything to do with the senator or perhaps the man you were speaking to?”
“No, not really,” Alton offered. “It has more to do with Bryce.”
“I don’t understand. How can I help? We haven’t spoken in four years.”
“No one needs to know that,” Bryce said.
The entire scenario didn’t make sense.
“Alexandria,” Mother began. “Do you follow the news?”
“The news?” I repeated incredulously.
Suzanna exhaled and leaned back against the edge of Alton’s desk, her arms crossed over her chest.
Finally, Alton sat at the table and began to fill in the blanks. As he spoke, I stared at Bryce and tried to judge if any of what Alton was saying were true. By both Mother’s and Suzanna’s expressions, I believed every word. With each sentence, my desire to stand diminished, and my legs grew weaker. Eventually, I collapsed into a chair at the table I despised. By the time Alton was done, all five of us were seated: Alton, Mother, and I in our assigned spots with Suzanna next to Mother and Bryce at the other end.
No matter the severity of the shitstorm blowing around us, Montague Manor had its hierarchy and it didn’t matter that Adelaide and I were the only true Montagues, males still perched like proud peacocks at the top. This place was a prison—an eighteenth-century torture chamber.
I needed to call Chelsea as soon as I could. If anyone could break me out, it was she.
Alton explained that an undergraduate student, a woman, who attended Northwestern, claimed that she and Bryce had been in a relationship last semester. Booth was in Chicago, near Northwestern.
She claimed that Bryce assaulted her, physically and sexually. She went to the police, and they took pictures of her bruises. The rape kit showed sexual activity, but the only DNA was a hair, and Bryce didn’t deny consensual sex. He did deny harming her. Montague attorneys have gotten the unfounded and unsubstantiated charges dropped, and a gag order in place. Unfortunately, about a week ago, someone leaked the story in an on-campus publication at Northwestern, during an early freshman orientation. The author of the article cited the incident as an example of a continued cover-up by university officials regarding sexual abuse of female students. No names were listed in the article. Alton believes that the author was aware of the gag order and didn’t want to pay the excessive fine. However, that didn’t stop other outlets from picking up the story. It was immediately run by a Chicago network and within hours was plastered all over social and news media.
The description of the perpetrator was vague, but there have been reporters sniffing around. The human resources and publicists for Montague suggested withdrawing the offer to employ Bryce, but Alton wouldn’t hear of that. Bryce continued to claim his innocence and Alton believed him. As CEO of Montague Corporation, Alton insisted that they find another way to lessen any possible negative impact to Montague Corporation if the full story were to be released.
The temperature of the room rose as everyone turned toward me.
“Darling,” Mother began. “This is your name, your company. You’ve had your time to see the world.”
I could scarcely believe my ears. “California is hardly the world.”
“You know what I mean.”
“No, I don’t know what you mean.” I looked around the table. “I don’t know what any of you want from me.”
Bryce cleared his throat. “Alex-x,” he stuttered, not completing my whole name. “I didn’t do it. You know me. You know who I am. No one knows that we haven’t been in contact.”
I did know him, and that didn’t reassure me.
When I didn’t answer, he went on, “Sure, I took that girl out on a few dates, and yes, we had sex, but look at me. Look at my family and the job I had waiting. I’m not only a Spencer but also a Carmichael. I don’t need to force anyone for sex. Why would I risk everything over some piece-of-trash college freshman?”
My stomach turned. “Freshman? Like eighteen?”
“Yes, she was legal.”
Oh God. That wasn’t where I was going with that. I may only be twenty-three, but Bryce was twenty-five, almost twenty-six. That was an eight-year difference. I pressed my lips into a straight line, reviving my Montague mask, the one that revealed nothing.
“Alexandria, dear,” Suzanna’s angry tone from the parlor had been replaced with saccharine sweetness—as artificial as ever. She wanted something from me and suddenly, we were friends again. “I’ve been upset with you, as you know, because your choice to move to the other side of the country upset my son. Once you have children, you’ll understand how we mothers feel everything our children do, but even more intensely.”
“How did it feel to rape a girl?” I asked.
Suzanna and Mother gasped, both sitting straight as if my words had the power to physically harm them. Simultaneously, the room echoed with the slap of Alton’s hand against the shiny wood. “Alexandria!”
Bryce’s brief look of anger magically morphed to hurt. I remembered seeing that transformation once before—no, more than once actually. It was that time I told him about Stanford that the anger lasted longer than a short moment, but there were other times I’d seen him upset, when we were young and then as teenagers. Did I think Bryce Spencer was capable of physical assault? Yes. An incident at the academy came to mind when he’d used a younger student as a punching bag simply because he’d made some comment about swimmers. If I recalled correctly, that incident was quickly brushed under the proverbial rug as well. After all, universities like Princeton and Duke didn’t look kindly at applications from students with records.
Did I think Bryce would hit a woman—a girl? I didn’t know.
With large gray puppy-dog eyes, Bryce asked, “Alex, how long did we date?”
Date? Was it still dating when he was at Duke and I was forbidden from seeing anyone else? Forbidden, or exiled?
“From the time I was fourteen until I graduated: four years,” I answered.
“How long were we friends before that?”
“Our whole lives.”
“How many times did we have sex?”
Are you kidding me?
I felt my cheeks redden, but not from embarrassment—from anger. “What the hell? You want to have this conversation in front of our parents?” I was too upset to separate Alton from that generalization.
“Yes,” Bryce replied. “I do. If I remember, we had the same conversation many times, alone.”
It was my turn to slap the table. “I’m not having this discussion with you again, alone or in front of an audience. It doesn’t matter.”
“It does, Alexandria. It does. I dated you for four years. You were my best friend. I miss you. Mom was right. I was devastated when you left for Stanford. I just prayed that you’d realize where you belong—back here with me. I didn’t follow you out to California because I knew you needed to make that choice yourself. It’s like that poem you always liked. Remember the one about loving something and setting it free?
“You were free,” he went on. “Now you’re back, and I want to resume where we left off. Why would I risk losing that by raping some gold-digging tramp?”
Disgust emanated from my eyes. I felt it. For not the first time in my life, I wished looks could kill. Bryce wanted us back together but more than that, he wanted me to help with his cover. That was why he’d said that no one knew we weren’t in contact.
“Never. Never. Never!” I said each word louder than the one before. “We never had sex, and we never will. So if you’re waiting for me, you should go ahead and screw every young thing out there. However,” I added, lowering my voice a decibel, “you might want to get their consent first. It’ll cut down on the legal fees. And I don’t plan on being your alibi.”
“Dear, lower your voice. You don’t want our guests to hear you.”
“Our guests, the people who we’re rudely ignoring. Are those the guests you’re referring to?”
“She’s right, Laide,” Alton said. “You and Suzanna go back out to the guests. Let them know that Alexandria will be out shortly, and we have an announcement.”
Like dutiful Southern women, they both stood.
“Alton,” Suzanna said, “I think it would be better for Laide and I to talk to Alex.” She smiled my direction, as if using my preferred name won her points. “Woman to woman.”
This is absolutely unbelievable.
I stood. “I tell you what. I’ll go out to the guests. I only know about two-thirds of them,” I said, shrugging. “But that’s all right. Supposedly, they’re here to wish me well. The only announcement we’ll be making is that I’ll be leaving Savannah on Monday and currently have no plans to return.”
I turned toward the door and was halfway there when Alton’s command reverberated through the paneled room.
“Stop.”
Though my feet obeyed, I kept my eyes fixed on the door, refusing to turn back around.
“Bryce,” Alton said. “Your mother is probably right. Let’s give the ladies a few minutes. I’m sure Alexandria will make the best decision for her family, for Montague.”
I spun toward them all. “What in the hell decision do you think I’ll make? What exactly are you asking?”
“I told you that I had a ring—”
“No!” I cut Bryce off. “Hell no.”
“We can start slowly. We’ll just mention how we never really lost contact. We agreed to an open relationship, one where we could both mature.”
Open relationship. Nox’s confident demeanor as he offered to tell Max we had an open marriage came to mind. My attention went back to Bryce and I raised my eyebrows. “So we could mature? Is that code for something, because as I recall as soon as I was out of the picture—no, before I was out of the picture—you were maturing with Millie.”
“Those were only rumors, ones that she started because she was jealous.”
We were all now standing, and Suzanna reached for Bryce’s arm. “Dear, go with Alton. You two have clients out there. Let Laide and I have a moment with Alex. It seems like it wouldn’t hurt.”
When she looked back at me, I shrugged. What the hell? This whole messed-up family wanted to gang up on me; they wanted to betray me.
Let them give it their best shot.