Page 52 of The Ring
With my free hand, I snap a few pictures, sensing that if the blonde teenager doesn’t get one she likes, she’ll make us repeat them. I focus on finding the best angle for them; it’s not hard. Cornelia doesn’t have a bad angle.
I lower the phone, making it clear I’ve finished taking pictures. If the blonde girl isn’t planning on talking to me, then neither am I. She rushes over and practically snatches her phone from my hand. After that, she goes to her friend, takes her bags back, and grabs her friend’s bags too.
Her friend approaches me, looking much nicer but more timid. “Could you?” she asks, holding out her phone.
“Yes,” I reply, happy to help this time since I wasactuallyasked.
The girl with the black hair stands beside Cornelia, and I take a few pictures with her phone.
“All done,” I tell her.
“Thank you so much!” the girl gushes to Cornelia as she walks over to me to retrieve her phone. “And thank you too,” she tells me with a timid smile.
The blonde girl groans and glares at me before turning to look at Cornelia. “Are you really back withhim?” she asks, hervoice dripping with a mix of anger and disgust. “How could you, after what he did to you—and with yourmum?”
My stomach drops. If I disliked her before, I can now say for sure that I hate her. I was feeling a little bad for beefing with a teenager, but not anymore. She’s acting like she’s entitled to Cornelia’s private life, sticking her nose into things she knows nothing about.
Her friend gives her a nudge with her elbow. “Audrey, isn’t it obvious? It’s because he’s so hot,” she mutters, as if that explains everything.
It makes me smile a bit.
“No,” Cornelia says decisively, her voice sharp. “No, we aredefinitelynot back together.” The way she says it stings—it’s absolute, like the thought of us being back together isn’t just impossible but ridiculous.
Her answer seems to calm the blonde girl, who is being pulled away by her friend. But before she’s gone, she shoots me a warning look and calls out to Cornelia, “You’d be better off with Nate. He didn’t sleep with your mother, and he’scuter.”
As I watch them leave, I really want to curse the blonde girl. She managed to flip the atmosphere between us—turning it from playful into something heavy, filled with tension, weighed down by our history and the mistakes we’ve made.
Cornelia walks a few steps ahead, her posture now rigid. I pick up my pace to match hers, wishing I could rewind time just a few minutes, to before those two girls derailed everything. But I can’t; it already happened, and I’m actually mad at her answer.
“Did you really have to make it sound like us being back together would be the worst thing in the world?” I ask her.
Cornelia stops walking and turns to me, her eyes burning. “Isn’t it?” she snaps. “You had sex with my mother.”
“And you had sex with my cousin,” I retort angrily.
“That’s not the same thing!” she exclaims.
“Pretty much sounds the same to me.” I slept with one of her relatives; she slept with one of mine—seems like that puts us on equal ground. Actually, what she did was worse. I didn’t mean to. I… I think I didn’t.
She glares at me. “For us to be equal, I should have slept with your father.” My face flattens at the thought—that’s not an image I want in my head—but luckily, Cornelia seems to also want to gag at the idea. “I slept with your cousin, and you slept with my mother when we weretogether. If you can’t see the difference, there’s no point in talking to you,” she snaps and crosses the street, which confuses me since Prada is on this side. But I follow her anyway.
As she notices me following her, she quickens her pace, speeding ahead until we reach YSL.
Cornelia turns to me with a disgusted, blank expression—the same look she gave me when I went to find her in Paris, the one I’ve been terrified would become the only way she looks at me if she learns the full story. “Tell Annabelle I’ll be waiting for her here,” she says and enters YSL before I can say anything else.
Chapter 27
Cornelia
One of the things I regret most in life happened in Paris. It happened 23 days after TJ and I broke up—well, kind of. It’s not like we had said the actual words, but when you find your boyfriend in your mother’s bed, that part is pretty much implied.
By then, I had developed a new coping mechanism: every time I felt a tinge of sadness, I’d head straight to Avenue Montaigne, Place Vendôme, or Le Bon Marché and buy out a few stores. That day, I woke up from a dream about TJ—one where he never cheated and we were still together. It was a nice dream.
But after waking up from it, I needed some retail therapy. So, I got dressed and went straight to Avenue Montaigne. I shopped a lot and returned to the flat five hours later with ten bags full of stuff.
I arrived at the flat building and started walking up the stairs. Halfway up—just like I always did—I cursed myself for not accepting my driver’s help to carry my bags. I also cursedParisians and their few small lifts, and my grandfather for buying the penthouse. Though, to be fair, I didn’t curse him much since the views from the flat definitely make all the stairs worth it.
I reached the flat and knocked—I wasn’t about to dig through all the bags to find which one I’d put my purse in to get my keys.
