Four Of A Kind

"Felix."

"Yeah?"

"Thank you."

"Don’t thank me. Thank me by surviving Thursday and telling me the story afterward. I want every detail. Every twitch of her eye. Every power move. I will bring popcorn to the retelling." Felix released my arm and returned to his lunch. "Also, if she murders you, I get the Lexus."

"The Lexus belongs to the Valentine family."

"Then I’ll negotiate with them. I’m very charming."

I almost laughed. Almost. But my phone buzzed, and the screen showed a notification that dropped the temperature in my chest by several degrees.

An email. From Miranda Chen, Mrs. Valentine’s personal assistant.

Subject line: THURSDAY MEETING, CONFIRMATION AND PROTOCOLS.

I opened it.

Mr. Angelo,

This message confirms your meeting with Mrs. Camille Ashford-Valentine at Valentine Holdings, 41st Floor, Conference Room A, on Thursday, November 14th at 3:00 PM EST.

Please arrive at 2:45 PM for security processing. A visitor badge will be prepared at the front desk. Please bring valid photo identification.

Business attire is expected.

Mrs. Valentine requests that you come alone.

Best,

Miranda Chen

Executive Assistant to Mrs. Camille Ashford-Valentine

Valentine Holdings Ltd.

The email was a scalpel. Clean. Cold. The kind of language that drew clear boundaries and dared you to cross them. There wasn’t an ounce of maternal instinct in those crisp, formatted lines. No hint that the woman writing it had daughters I’d been spending time with. That I’d watched grow fonder of me despite every attempt I’d made to keep things simple. Mrs. Valentine wasn’t thinking of me as Isaiah, the bartender who made them laugh or helped them with homework. I was a data point. A variable in her carefully managed equation.

Business attire is expected.

I had one suit that qualified. The black wool two-piece Vivienne had arranged for me through Mr. Bellamy. I’d worn it to the Valentine Ball, where I’d kissed Vivienne behind a locked bathroom door, held Sabrina’s hand while she read my fortune, and watched Cassidy look at me like I was prey she hadn’t decided whether to chase or consume.

That suit made me look like someone who belonged in rooms with marble floors and elevator banks that only stopped on executive levels. It fit me the way things fit people who were born into money. Shoulders pressed just right. Pants breaking at the exact proper length above expensive shoes. But underneath all that Italian wool and silk lining, I was still the same kid who’d stitched his first pair of work pants because the originals had torn.

Every uniform I owned was a lie of omission. The Hartwell blazer. The bartender’s vest. The vampire costume from the festival. All of them let me slip into spaces where I didn’t have the pedigree to exist. The suit was just the most expensive version of that trick.

But the hands inside the gloves were still the same hands that made Iris’s lunches at four in the morning. The feet inside the polished shoes still knew every crack in the Kensington sidewalk. And the heart beating under the silk pocket square still belonged to a kid from North Philly who had learned, very early and very permanently, that the people with the most money often had the least mercy.

"Angelo." Felix snapped his fingers. "You’re doing the thing."

"What thing?"

"The thing where you stare at your phone and your jaw goes all tight and you look like you’re solving a murder in your head. What happened?"

"Confirmation email. Thursday’s official."

Felix went quiet for three full seconds, which was a record for him. Then he reached across the table, grabbed the container of Chef Laurent’s cookies, placed it directly in front of me, and said:

"Eat more cookies. You’ll need the calories."

I ate more cookies.

The rest of lunch passed in something approximating normalcy, with Felix filling the silence with a detailed ranking of every drink served at the festival and his conviction that the Lover’s Bite recipe I’d improvised could become a real menu item if we partnered with a local café. I let him talk. His voice was familiar and comfortable, the background noise of a friendship that had survived three years of Hartwell’s social hierarchy without requiring either of us to change. Felix didn’t care that I was a scholarship kid. He didn’t care that I was broke, or tired, or dating four girls who shared a face. He cared that I showed up, that I listened to his terrible jokes, and that I didn’t judge him for eating his feelings when his father called to discuss quarterly performance expectations.

At 12:58, two minutes before the bell, my phone buzzed one final time.

A text from Sabrina.

"Did you read my note?"

"Yes."

"When you’re ready, I’ll be in the library. Same spot. Same book."

I stared at those words for longer than I meant to. Same spot. Same book. The bay window nook on the second floor where she’d materialized beside me that first time, settling into the beanbag chair with the kind of ease that suggested she’d claimed that space long before I arrived. Like she’d been occupying that corner of the library for years, reading that same novel, and I’d simply walked past her every day until something in the universe’s timing decided I was allowed to notice her.

The bell cut through the cafeteria noise.

I slid my phone into my pocket, picked up my tray, and moved through the lunch crowd toward fifth period. Somewhere across campus, in a library nook with a view of Central Park, Sabrina Valentine sat with a copy of The Count of Monte Cristo open in her lap. She’d wait there. She’d been waiting since September, patient in that way that made you wonder if time moved differently for her, if she experienced days the same way normal people did or if she existed slightly outside the normal flow of hours and minutes.

She’d wait as long as it took for me to finish catching up.

Forty-four hours until Thursday.

I straightened the collar of my uniform, felt the weight of the wallet in my back pocket, Iris’s photo and Sabrina’s note and Vivienne’s letter all pressed together like pages of the same book, and headed to class.

Visit and read more novel to help us update chapter quickly. Thank you so much!