Sadie shook her head, her lips pressed together. “No. I don’t—”
“He dreams about you,” Lulu said.
Sadie swallowed a lump. “How do you know?”
“You’ll have to talk to him and find out,” Lulu said, wiggling her eyebrows.
“I really don’t think it would be—”
“Lulu, are you handing out programs or picking pock—” His eyes met hers, and it was like there was no one else there, no one else in the world.
Sadie couldn’t find any words. She couldn’t breathe. Neither of them spoke, just stared at each other.
“Did you design this?” Sadie asked finally, seeing the picture of him on the back of the programs Lulu was holding.
“A friend of mine did,” he said, still staring at her. “I just restored it.”
“It’s beautiful.” Her eyes didn’t leave his.
“Breathtaking,” he said.
Lulu said, “Please meet, because I want to invite Sadie to my birthday party. Sadie, this is Ford, my brother. Ford, this is Sadie.”
“Sadie,” he repeated, savoring it. He glanced at Lulu. “How do you two know each other?”
“We met a few years ago,” Lulu told him. “She helped a friend of mine.”
“Will you come to Lulu’s birthday party?” he said. “It’s going to be about a hundred fourteen-year-olds and me.”
“Mom’s in Paris on a painting course,” Lulu explained. “With her boyfriend.”
Sadie blinked back tears. “I’d love to.”
“We’re having it at our house on Ladyvine Street,” Ford put in. “It has a tree house—”
“—with a rocking horse head on the wall,” Sadie said.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I owe enormous thanks to all my friends and family for being so understanding when I disappear for weeks at a time in writer’s jail, surfacing only to gulp coffee and snarl. Super special thank you’s go to Meg Cabot, Benjamin Egnatz, Sigmund Freud, Susan Ginsburg, Peter Jaffe, Rebecca Kilman, Jaques Lacan, Nespresso, pizza, Laura Rosenbury, Santa, Ben Schrank, Georges Seurat, Carlyle Stewart, and Jennifer Sturman; without your support and guidance, I would have long gone out of my mind.
Susan Ginsburg’s mixture of wisdom, kindness, intelligence, and generosity continues to dazzle, inspire, and fill me with wonder. She is a marvel. I don’t know how I got lucky enough to have her as my agent, but I am grateful in a hundred ways every single day.
Rebecca Kilman and Ben Schrank, my braintrust at Razorbill, went above, beyond, through, and around the call of duty for this book. What’s good in it is theirs; the flaws are mine.