Page 85 of Gilt

“You want it?” I dangle the key fob between us.

Josie flicks the bottom of it, then sighs. “This is yours, girl. I’ll keep looking until I find a sugar daddy who’ll buy me my own.”

I know one who would. I nearly gag at the thought.

“Enjoy it, Emma,” she advises me. “It’s been a shit year, and it’s just a car. Who cares where it came from?”

Maybe she has a point. I decide to christen the car Pain and Suffering. It’s a fitting name. If I’m going to cover the cost of years of therapy by myself, I guess I can accept the car.

“Care to go on a joyride?” I offer.

“I’d love to, but I promised my mom that I would drive her to work this summer, so she didn’t have to figure out parking.”

“Isn’t it a bit early for her to be going in?” I glance at the digital clock on the dash. I realize it’s already 8:30 in the morning, but Vegas doesn’t exactly run on traditional work schedules.

“She has a fitting.” Josie groans as she pets the sleek console between us. “I really wish I could stay and play. I have a feeling this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship,” she murmurs lustfully.

“Get out of my car.” I shove her playfully. “Before you leave a stain on the passenger’s seat. I need to run a few errands, anyway. I’ll catch up with you later.”

“Okay,” she agrees, then she leans over, and air kisses my cheeks.

“What was that for?” Trust Josie to make me laugh when I’m trying to be pissed off about something.

“You’re a sophisticated woman now,” she says. “You drive a Mercedes.”

“That doesn’t make me European.”

“Whatever you say, darling.” She blows me a kiss before she climbs into her car.

Considering that I hadn’t planned on coming back to Belle Mère so soon, there’s more than a few things I need to tackle on my to-do list. I know I should triage the items—decide which is most important and start there— but there’s one activity I can’t put off any longer.

Belle Pointe is a smaller hospital, not the trauma center that I’d been brought to after the accident at Jameson’s penthouse. After a few days, I’d been released from that hospital into my mother’s care. Leighton hadn’t been so lucky. Sometime in the last month, they moved her from Las Vegas General to the cushy private institution.

Undoubtedly, it’s closer to her parents, but it has to cost twice as much. She still hasn’t woken up, so I’m not sure she appreciates the upgrade. I don’t know what to expect when I stop at the front desk. “I’d like to visit a patient.”

“Fill out the chart.” The nurse doesn’t bother to look up from the paperwork she’s sorting. I search for a pen for a few seconds before she reaches out and plucks one out of a ceramic planter. The top of the pen has a flower glued to it.

“Cute.” I take it from her.

“You’d be surprised how many pens wander off.” She shrugs and returns to her work. Not only is this place super swanky, judging from how hard it is to tell the waiting area apart from a lobby of a 4-star hotel, but it also conducts social experiments on important topics like pen stealing. As if they couldn’t afford to buy more pens, given how much a place like this costs.

I write down Leighton’s name, then mine, and the time before I hand the clipboard back.

She checks it, then eyes me for a second. “Are you a family member?”

“Do I have to be?” I ask, unwilling to commit to an actual answer.

“You just look a little like her.”

I almost tell her that I was the other girl in the accident—the one who walked away with a few bad cuts and some stitches—but it’s not a fact I want to boast about.

“How is she doing?” I ask.

“Not my floor,” the nurse admits. “You can ask the attending when you get up there. She’s in room 321.”

Despite the hefty price tag this place comes with, they don’t bother with much security. I head toward the bank of elevators. Stepping inside, I spot Jonas just as the sliding doors shut. I guess I’m not the only one back in town. I hadn’t seen him since the accident, but Josie, who somehow knows the geographical location of half of the school, has kept me up to date on his family’s travels for the summer. I consider hitting the button to open the doors, instead, I hit the one for the 3rd floor.

It seems impossible to go from wanting to talk to someone every day to having nothing left to say to them. Somehow Jonas and I accomplished that. Although, I’m pretty certain he perfected it years ago. I hung on to a relationship that had been over for an embarrassingly long time. Chasing after him now seems like a step in the wrong direction.