My mother nodded while Suzanna and Alton shared an expression somewhere between pain and disgust.

I forced another laugh. “A situation? Does this have anything to do with the senator or perhaps the man you were speaking to?”

“No, not really,” Alton offered. “It has more to do with Bryce.”

“I don’t understand. How can I help? We haven’t spoken in four years.”

“No one needs to know that,” Bryce said.

The entire scenario didn’t make sense.

“Alexandria,” Mother began. “Do you follow the news?”

“The news?” I repeated incredulously.

Suzanna exhaled and leaned back against the edge of Alton’s desk, her arms crossed over her chest.

Finally, Alton sat at the table and began to fill in the blanks. As he spoke, I stared at Bryce and tried to judge if any of what Alton was saying were true. By both Mother’s and Suzanna’s expressions, I believed every word. With each sentence, my desire to stand diminished, and my legs grew weaker. Eventually, I collapsed into a chair at the table I despised. By the time Alton was done, all five of us were seated: Alton, Mother, and I in our assigned spots with Suzanna next to Mother and Bryce at the other end.

No matter the severity of the shitstorm blowing around us, Montague Manor had its hierarchy and it didn’t matter that Adelaide and I were the only true Montagues, males still perched like proud peacocks at the top. This place was a prison—an eighteenth-century torture chamber.

I needed to call Chelsea as soon as I could. If anyone could break me out, it was she.

Alton explained that an undergraduate student, a woman, who attended Northwestern, claimed that she and Bryce had been in a relationship last semester. Booth was in Chicago, near Northwestern.

She claimed that Bryce assaulted her, physically and sexually. She went to the police, and they took pictures of her bruises. The rape kit showed sexual activity, but the only DNA was a hair, and Bryce didn’t deny consensual sex. He did deny harming her. Montague attorneys have gotten the unfounded and unsubstantiated charges dropped, and a gag order in place. Unfortunately, about a week ago, someone leaked the story in an on-campus publication at Northwestern, during an early freshman orientation. The author of the article cited the incident as an example of a continued cover-up by university officials regarding sexual abuse of female students. No names were listed in the article. Alton believes that the author was aware of the gag order and didn’t want to pay the excessive fine. However, that didn’t stop other outlets from picking up the story. It was immediately run by a Chicago network and within hours was plastered all over social and news media.

The description of the perpetrator was vague, but there have been reporters sniffing around. The human resources and publicists for Montague suggested withdrawing the offer to employ Bryce, but Alton wouldn’t hear of that. Bryce continued to claim his innocence and Alton believed him. As CEO of Montague Corporation, Alton insisted that they find another way to lessen any possible negative impact to Montague Corporation if the full story were to be released.

The temperature of the room rose as everyone turned toward me.

“Darling,” Mother began. “This is your name, your company. You’ve had your time to see the world.”

I could scarcely believe my ears. “California is hardly the world.”

“You know what I mean.”

“No, I don’t know what you mean.” I looked around the table. “I don’t know what any of you want from me.”

Bryce cleared his throat. “Alex-x,” he stuttered, not completing my whole name. “I didn’t do it. You know me. You know who I am. No one knows that we haven’t been in contact.”

I did know him, and that didn’t reassure me.

When I didn’t answer, he went on, “Sure, I took that girl out on a few dates, and yes, we had sex, but look at me. Look at my family and the job I had waiting. I’m not only a Spencer but also a Carmichael. I don’t need to force anyone for sex. Why would I risk everything over some piece-of-trash college freshman?”

My stomach turned. “Freshman? Like eighteen?”

“Yes, she was legal.”

Oh God. That wasn’t where I was going with that. I may only be twenty-three, but Bryce was twenty-five, almost twenty-six. That was an eight-year difference. I pressed my lips into a straight line, reviving my Montague mask, the one that revealed nothing.

“Alexandria, dear,” Suzanna’s angry tone from the parlor had been replaced with saccharine sweetness—as artificial as ever. She wanted something from me and suddenly, we were friends again. “I’ve been upset with you, as you know, because your choice to move to the other side of the country upset my son. Once you have children, you’ll understand how we mothers feel everything our children do, but even more intensely.”

“How did it feel to rape a girl?” I asked.

Suzanna and Mother gasped, both sitting straight as if my words had the power to physically harm them. Simultaneously, the room echoed with the slap of Alton’s hand against the shiny wood. “Alexandria!”

Bryce’s brief look of anger magically morphed to hurt. I remembered seeing that transformation once before—no, more than once actually. It was that time I told him about Stanford that the anger lasted longer than a short moment, but there were other times I’d seen him upset, when we were young and then as teenagers. Did I think Bryce Spencer was capable of physical assault? Yes. An incident at the academy came to mind when he’d used a younger student as a punching bag simply because he’d made some comment about swimmers. If I recalled correctly, that incident was quickly brushed under the proverbial rug as well. After all, universities like Princeton and Duke didn’t look kindly at applications from students with records.

Did I think Bryce would hit a woman—a girl? I didn’t know.

With large gray puppy-dog eyes, Bryce asked, “Alex, how long did we date?”

Date? Was it still dating when he was at Duke and I was forbidden from seeing anyone else? Forbidden, or exiled?

“From the time I was fourteen until I graduated: four years,” I answered.

“How long were we friends before that?”

“Our whole lives.”

“How many times did we have sex?”

Are you kidding me?

I felt my cheeks redden, but not from embarrassment—from anger. “What the hell? You want to have this conversation in front of our parents?” I was too upset to separate Alton from that generalization.

“Yes,” Bryce replied. “I do. If I remember, we had the same conversation many times, alone.”

It was my turn to slap the table. “I’m not having this discussion with you again, alone or in front of an audience. It doesn’t matter.”

“It does, Alexandria. It does. I dated you for four years. You were my best friend. I miss you. Mom was right. I was devastated when you left for Stanford. I just prayed that you’d realize where you belong—back here with me. I didn’t follow you out to California because I knew you needed to make that choice yourself. It’s like that poem you always liked. Remember the one about loving something and setting it free?

“You were free,” he went on. “Now you’re back, and I want to resume where we left off. Why would I risk losing that by raping some gold-digging tramp?”

Disgust emanated from my eyes. I felt it. For not the first time in my life, I wished looks could kill. Bryce wanted us back together but more than that, he wanted me to help with his cover. That was why he’d said that no one knew we weren’t in contact.

“Never. Never. Never!” I said each word louder than the one before. “We never had sex, and we never will. So if you’re waiting for me, you should go ahead and screw every young thing out there. However,” I added, lowering my voice a decibel, “you might want to get their consent first. It’ll cut down on the legal fees. And I don’t plan on being your alibi.”