Page 30 of Enchanted to Meet You

I paused, my heart doing a strange, tight twist in my chest. We hadn’t talked about it seriously since Saturday morning when the envelope first arrived and we’d all made fun of it. Like I’d told Nora and Clementine, I wasn’t even sure if I wanted to go. Then everything with Rhys had happened, and it had more or less fallen from my mind, but now, all the emotions of it were hitting me full force again. Laughing about it had been easy. Facing the reality of it coming up was something entirely different.

“What about it?” I asked, setting my cup down.

“Just... the fact that it’s actually happening “ Imogen muttered, staring aimlessly at the scratched wood between our drinks. “Dad texted me during lunch today.”

I sucked in a harsh breath. Imogen was the only one of us that had had regular contact with Dad after he left. For a few months, she lied to us about where she was going so she could stay overnight with him—and by extension Hilary—for a night most weekends. She told me it only ended when Hilary got pregnant and Imogen realized that Dad had moved on with his new family and that he would always see her second to his new baby. When she’d revealed the truth about it all to me, I hadn’t been surprised by that in the slightest. Really, the pain I felt from the reveal had mostly come from the fact that she’d lied to me about it for so long.

“What did he say?” I asked carefully. I wasn’t sure if I wanted to know, but I couldn’t leave it there.

She rolled her eyes. “Nothing important. Asking if we needed him to order us dresses. Like he’s just expecting us to show up at the country club, sip bottomless mimosas, and smile for photos like good little daughters.”

“He’s delusional,” I said flatly. “He thinks if he throws enough money at a party, it erases the last ten months. Standing around watching Hilary open sterling silver rattles while Dad acts like a proud, youthful father would make me physically throw up.”

“I know,” Imogen said. “I know it’s absurd. And I told myself I didn’t care, especially when Seb swore he’d break his own ankle before putting on a suit for them, and Lavender said she never wanted to see Hilary again in her life.” She paused, her fingers picking at the edge of her binder. “But every time I think about not going, I get this weird, sick feeling in my stomach.”

I wanted to say something—something encouraging, something that would help this situation—but the words got stuck in my throat. And what was there to say really? That I’d felt the same way, once or twice? That when I tried to imagine a future where I completely cut Dad off and never met my little sister, something about it felt wrong?

“It’s not about him,” Imogen continued, her voice dropping so low I had to lean in closer to hear her over the hiss of the espresso machine. “That’s the thing. I don’t give a damn about Dad’s feelings, and I definitely don’t care about Hilary’s. But... there’s going to be a baby, Ainsley. An actual baby. In just over a month, there’s going to be a little girl who shares half our DNA, and if we refuse to be there from the very beginning, then we’re letting Dad and Hilary build a wall around her. She’s going to grow up thinking her half-sisters hated her before she was even born.”

I swallowed hard, the cold, hollow ache settling deep in my chest. I hadn’t let myself think about that part. It was so much easier to stay angry at Dad, to mock the lavish registry, to treat the whole thing like a grotesque circus.

“We can’t control what Dad tells her, Imogen,” I said softly, though the words felt flimsy even to me.

“No, but we control whether we show up,” Imogen replied, her sharp edge softening into something raw and fragile. “I hate the baby shower. I hate the theme, I hate the country club, and I hate that Dad is acting like he’s starting a brand-new, perfect family. But I don’t want to hate the baby. And I don’t want to be the bitter older sister who vanished.”

I stared at my twin, watching the heavy weight she’d been carrying all week finally spill out onto the table.

“So what do we do?” I asked quietly.

Imogen let out a slow, trembling breath and leaned back in her chair. “I don’t know. I honestly don’t know.”

My room was, by design, the least Rhys-Montgomery-friendly space in the entire town of North Glen. White walls, a pink duvet with a pink canopy draped over my bed that I’d begged my parents for when I was twelve, a string of fairy lights looped along the ceiling that I only ever turned on when I wanted the room to feel like it belonged in a softer, less complicated version of my life. My speaker sat propped on the windowsill, blasting the same playlist I’d had on repeat since February, loud enough that the bass rattled the little dish of hair clips on my desk every time the chorus hit.

I was sprawled across my bed on my stomach, chemistry textbook open to a page I’d been staring at for twenty minutes without absorbing a single word of it, when my phone buzzed against the duvet.

I glanced at the screen, and my stomach did the small, familiar drop it had started doing every time his name showed up anywhere near my life, which I was choosing, for my own sanity, not to examine.

That Guy was the contact name I’d saved him under on the weekend, mostly because I knew I couldn’t have his real name saved in my phone and I hadn’t been able to come up with a clever nickname for him. I couldn’t exactly save him as “fake boyfriend.” I just hoped Kelcey never happened to see his contact in my phone, because I’d have a heck of a time trying to explain this one away to her.

I answered warily, one hand still holding my pencil like I might get back to my homework any second now. “What?”

“Is that any way to greet your boyfriend?”

“Fake boyfriend,” I clarified. “Real relationships don’t usually have rules and timelines.”

“—can’t hear a word you’re saying.” His voice came through half-swallowed by static, or maybe just by the music I had blaring, which admittedly was loud enough to be a legitimate structural hazard at this point. “Hang on—is that music? Turn it down.”

“No.”

“I can’t hear you over it!”

“That’s a you problem.” I rolled onto my back, holding the phone a few inches from my ear so the chorus didn’t drown him out completely, and immediately got far too much enjoyment out of making him repeat himself.

“What is that, a concert? Are you hosting a concert in your bedroom?”

“How do you know I’m in my bedroom?” I teased. “Maybe I ran off to Toronto for a concert. You don’t know.”

“I can see your bedroom light on.”