It was my turn again. “Never have I ever faked my own disappearance because of something Thatcher Townsend said to me.”
Michael’s father had denied that he’d slept with Celine, gone to see her the day she disappeared, and threatened her. But, as Lia had pointed out, his denial could ring true if he was telling the truth about any one of the three.
Maybe he didn’t sleep with you, but went to see you anyway. Maybe he threatened you about something else.
Celine—brash and bold and fearless—lowered a finger.
“Never have I ever been threatened because of one of my father’s business dealings.” Dean took a shot next, but struck out.
Celine turned to Michael. “This is getting tedious,” she told him. Clearly, whatever Thatcher Townsend had said to her, she wasn’t in a sharing mood.
There was a moment of silence, and then Lia filled it. “Never have I ever let someone beat the crap out of me.”
That brought Michael’s attention from Celine to Lia. “You got me,” he said, gesturing toward his swollen lip. “Very insightful.”
Instead of replying, Lia dropped her left hand. It took me a moment to realize that, in doing so, she’d brought down her middle finger, too. With a start, I realized that was Lia’s way of telling Michael that she’d been exactly where he was.
There was another long stretch of silence, and then: “Never have I ever been publicly acknowledged by my own father.” Celine’s voice was rough in her throat, like the exchange that had just passed between Michael and Lia had meant something to her, too.
Sloane stared at Celine. Since my father had acknowledged me, I lowered a finger. So did Dean. So did Michael. So did Lia.
But Sloane’s fingers stayed up. “Are you illegitimate, too?” she asked Celine. There was no judgment in her voice, no awareness that the question wasn’t the kind that people could politely ask.
Michael turned to look at Celine, searching her face for answers. “CeCe?”
If Celine was illegitimate, Michael clearly hadn’t known. I thought about the emotions that he’d read on his father’s face when Celine was missing. Furious. Affronted. Personally insulted.
Hungry.
A man like Thatcher Townsend hungered for things he couldn’t have. Things that someone had denied him. Things that are rightfully yours.
Suddenly, I saw the whole situation from a different perspective—why Thatcher might have gone to see Celine, why Celine might have responded the way she had, why she’d followed Michael back here, why Thatcher Townsend had involved himself in the investigation from the get-go.
She has her father’s temper, I thought, Elise Delacroix’s statement taking on new meaning in my mind. Not Remy Delacroix’s. Her father’s. Michael’s father’s.
Michael turned away from the secrets he saw laid bare on Celine’s face. “As the birthday king, it is within my rights to demand a rumpus of Where the Wild Things Are proportions. And as it happens,” he continued, masking his own emotions the way that only an emotion-reader could, “as the recipient of a recently released trust fund, I have a few ideas.”
Michael’s idea of a party involved an amusement park rented out for the evening for our amusement and our amusement alone.
“Do I want to know how much this cost?” Dean asked.
“Doubtful,” Michael replied. “Do I want to know why you have a phobia of integrating colors into your wardrobe? Almost certainly not!”
When I’d first met Michael, I’d found him difficult to profile. But now I understood. Reading emotions was never your only survival mechanism. He’d learned not to feel things, to turn everything into a joke, to shrug off revelations that shook his worldview to its core.
A quick glance at Celine told me that was a trait they shared. The edges of her lips quirked up in a slight smile. “Not bad,” she told Michael, taking in the lights of the Ferris wheel in the distance.
“What can I say?” he replied. “Good taste runs in the family.”
The subtext to those words was deafening.
Sloane frowned. “The number of taste buds one has is heritable, but that does not affect aesthetic or entertainment preferences, to the best of my knowledge.”
Celeste didn’t miss a beat. “The brainy type,” she declared loftily. “I approve.”
Sloane was quiet for several seconds. “Most people don’t.”
My heart hurt at the matter-of-fact way Sloane said those words.
Her manner uncharacteristically gentle, Celine hooked an arm through Sloane’s. “How would you feel about trying to win me a goldfish?”
Sloane clearly had no idea how to reply, so she went with the path of least resistance. “Goldfish don’t have stomachs or eyelids. And their resting attention span is actually one-point-oh-nine times that of the average human.”
As Celine led Sloane toward the carnival games, I started to follow, but Michael held me back. “She’ll be fine,” he told me. “Celine is…” He trailed off, then changed course. “I trust her.”
“It’s good to have someone you can trust.” Lia’s tone wasn’t cutting, but that meant nothing. She was more than capable of coating razor blades in sugar.
“I never said you could trust me,” Michael shot back. “I don’t trust me.”
“Maybe I’m saying that you can trust me.” Lia played with the tips of her jet-black ponytail, making those words sound like nothing more than a lark. “Or maybe I’m saying that you absolutely cannot trust me not to wreak vengeance upon you in creative and increasingly absurd ways.”
With that somewhat concerning statement, Lia hooked her arm through Dean’s the way Celine had hooked hers through Sloane’s. “I see a roller coaster with my name on it, Dean-o. You game?”
Lia rarely asked Dean for anything. He wasn’t about to refuse now. As the two of them peeled off from the group, I pushed down the instinct to follow.
“And then,” Michael murmured, “there were two.”
We ended up in the house of mirrors.
“You’re trying very hard not to profile me,” Michael commented as we wove our way through the mazelike expanse.
“What gave me away?” I asked.
He tapped two fingers against my temple, then indicated the tilt of my chin. We passed a set of curvy mirrors that distorted our reflections, stretching them out, condensing them, the colors in my reflection blending into the colors in his. “I’ll save you the effort, Colorado. I’m a person who wants what he can’t have as a method of proving to himself that he doesn’t deserve the things he wants. And for someone with my abilities, I have an uncanny knack for not seeing the obvious staring me in the face.”