Four Of A Kind

Sabrina’s handwriting was small and elegant, each letter formed with the kind of care that suggested she’d been writing this way since she first held a pen. No printed perfection, no typed efficiency. Actual ink on actual paper, and the slight variation in pressure told me she’d written this slowly, thinking about each word.

The note said:

"My father left me a letter I haven’t opened yet. It’s in the box I showed you. When this is over, I want you to be there when I read it. Not because I need someone. Because I want you."

Below the message, she’d drawn a single rose in ink. The petals were detailed enough to cast shadows.

I read the note three times. Then I folded it and put it in my wallet, behind Iris’s photo and next to Vivienne’s appendix page. The wallet was getting crowded with things that mattered. Six months ago the only thing in there was a fake ID for the bar and a twenty-dollar bill I kept for emergencies.

Times change.

Lunch arrived at 12:15, and I found my way to the cafeteria with the same gravitational reluctance I brought to every social gathering at Hartwell. The room was loud, as always, with the acoustic properties of a gymnasium that someone had decided to fill with three hundred teenagers and a salad bar. I grabbed a tray out of habit, loaded it with whatever the cafeteria staff had deemed nutrition that day, and headed for the back corner table that had been mine since freshman year.

Felix was already there, halfway through a plate of something that looked like it had been prepared by a completely different kitchen than the one available to the rest of us. Knowing Felix, it probably had been. The Beaumont family had connections everywhere, including, apparently, Hartwell’s food services department.

"Angelo." Felix gestured with a fork. "Sit. Eat. You look like someone who’s about to fight God and hasn’t had breakfast."

"I had a burrito this morning."

"That was four hours ago. Your body runs on spite and caffeine, and I say that with love." Felix pushed a container across the table. "Laurent sent these with Harlow, who gave them to me, who is now giving them to you, which makes me a middleman in a cookie supply chain run by billionaire teenagers. My life has gotten very weird since I befriended you."

I opened the container. Inside were dark chocolate espresso cookies, the kind that smelled like they’d been engineered in a laboratory to target every pleasure center in the human brain. I took one and bit into it, and the taste was so aggressively good that I briefly forgot about Camille Valentine and Thursday and the entire dumpster fire of my romantic situation.

"These are illegal," I said.

"Chef Laurent doesn’t make legal food. That man operates outside the jurisdiction of normal baking."

I ate two more cookies in silence while Felix demolished whatever aristocratic lunch he’d procured. The cafeteria churned around us with the usual social machinery: athletes trading insults by the windows, debate team kids arguing about something that was probably not actually worth arguing about, and a cluster of sophomore girls at the table nearest to ours who kept looking at me and whispering.

The festival photos. Right.

"So," Felix began, and the way he said it, with that particular upward inflection that meant he was about to ask something he’d been rehearsing, told me everything I needed to know about what was coming. "Thursday."

"Thursday."

"Camille Valentine’s office. Midtown. Forty-first floor."

"You’ve done research."

"Google exists, Angelo. Her office has a two-hundred-degree view of Manhattan and a desk made from a single piece of imported Italian marble. There are articles about the desk. People have written actual journalism about this woman’s furniture." Felix leaned forward. "I need you to understand what you’re walking into."

"I understand."

"Do you? Because I did more research. Camille Valentine fired a VP last April during a meeting that lasted eleven minutes. The man had been with the company for fourteen years. She had security escort him out while his coffee was still warm on the conference table." Felix tapped the table with his index finger. "Eleven minutes, Isaiah. She ended a decade and a half career in less time than it takes to watch a YouTube video."

"What’s your point?"

"My point is that this woman eats people. She chews them up and arranges their bones into quarterly projections. And you, my beautiful, stupid best friend, are going to sit across from her and tell her that you’re dating not one, not two, but ALL FOUR of her daughters." Felix’s eyes widened with something that lived in the neighborhood between admiration and horror. "You are the bravest idiot I have ever known."

"I’m not telling her anything she doesn’t already know."

"That’s WORSE. That means she’s had time to prepare. Camille Valentine with preparation time is like giving a nuclear power extra uranium." Felix grabbed my arm across the table. "Listen to me. I have resources. My family has lawyers. Very expensive, very mean lawyers who make other lawyers cry in depositions. If Thursday goes sideways, you call me and I will have a legal team in that building before the elevator reaches the lobby."

I looked at Felix. Really looked at him, for the first time in a while. We’d been friends since freshman year, since the day he’d tried to introduce himself with a French air-kiss and I’d accidentally headbutted him in the nose. He’d laughed so hard he cried, bought me lunch, and declared us bonded for life. Three years later, he was offering me his family’s legal arsenal to protect me from a woman he’d never met because he believed, with the irrational conviction of someone who has never been let down by his own wealth, that problems could always be solved if you threw enough resources at them.

He wasn’t wrong, necessarily. But he also wasn’t right.

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