Page 11 of Don't Cross the Blue Line
Something crosses his face. A slight narrowing. The beginning of a thought he can’t finish.
My heart stops. Wait. Maybe he doesn’t recognize me.
And I’m meaning me as in…well, Everly, the coach’s daughter, who?—
“E.J.!” Bree’s voice carries across the ballroom like a foghorn. “Line’s not getting shorter!”
His expression shifts. He looks at me. At the tray. At the signing table across the room, where Bree is standing next to a banner that reads “Author of Thriller on Ice—Signing Tonight.”
“Oh—” The color hits his cheeks like someone flipped a switch. He reaches for the Perrier bottle. “You’re that author. I am so sorry. I thought you were—I didn’t realize?—”
For one white-hot, cardiac-event-level second when he said You’re that author, I thought he meant Sutton Blake.
Which is crazy, right? Because he means E.J. Hartley. The thriller writer.
Yes, yes, I know. Too many identities. We already talked about this. But he’s looking right at me, and he sees the least real version of who I am.
He doesn’t know I’m Sutton Blake. And he has clearly not recognized Everly Hart—Coach’s daughter, the girl with the pigtails, who he humiliated so many years ago.
However, he’s probably figured out that I’m the girl from the elevator. Because, you know, he graduated from eighth grade.
Stop laughing. That wasn’t funny. He’s not funny!
Especially since I’m standing three feet from Beckett Benson and I am completely, totally invisible.
I take the Perrier bottle off the tray and set it on the buffet table with a precise tap. Icy cool.
“Easy mistake,” I say. And my voice is E.J. Hartley’s voice. Cool, professional, a little wry. “The tray probably didn’t help.”
“Can I—let me at least?—”
“Don’t worry about it.”
I turn and walk toward the signing table. Steady. Controlled. A woman who has her life together and has definitely not had two identity crises in the last two minutes.
I sit down and smile at the first person in line.
“Hi. Who should I make it out to?”
Under the table, my hand goes to my bracelet.
It’s gone.
My wrist is bare. The silver chain, the tiny book charm—gone. I twist my hand, check the other wrist, feel along my collar, scan the floor. Nothing. The last time I had it?—
The elevator. I was gripping it during the conversation. Pressing the charm into my skin. And then the lights came on and I ripped off his jacket and?—
“Could you sign it to Jennifer?”
I snap back to attention, smiling up at the woman in line. “Jennifer,” I repeat. My handwriting doesn’t shake. My smile doesn’t crack.
But the romance writer in my chest—the one I keep locked away, the one I never let speak—whispers:
This is how the story starts.
Over my dead body, I tell her. This isn’t a story. This is my life.
But she’s already writing the next chapter.
