Had Lucas found the ring? If so, he hadn’t bothered to text or e-mail or call her. So many ways to get in touch, but without emotion they were meaningless.
“We leave in fifty minutes, Alana. Frederica, stop singing foul language at your sister and get dressed, please.”
“Told you so,” Alana whispered.
Freddie stuck out her tongue, grabbed her phone, and slid off the bed. “Don’t go anywhere.”
She wasn’t going anywhere. That was the point. She was home, and needed here. This was her life, her family.
She stripped and got into the enormous shower, shivering from the cold air that collected in the corners of the stall. She applied lotion, dried her hair and spritzed it with shine spray, then shimmied into her underwear. When she opened the door to put on her ball gown, Freddie was waiting in her own dress in a brilliant shade of ruby red. She turned her back to Alana.
“Zip me up.”
“So you’re wearing red and Mother’s wearing white, and I’m wearing blue,” Alana said as she ran up the zipper. “We’re the Senator’s living flag.”
Freddie squirmed and wriggled the tight bodice into place, then smoothed the skirt with her hands. “What do you think? Alexander McQueen.”
“It’s beautiful. It’s the perfect color for you, too.”
“I’m thinking about getting married in red,” Freddie said nonchalantly. “This shade. It’s Toby’s favorite color. Red for love. Red for power. Red for passion. Red for blood of my blood and bone of my bone. God knows I’m hardly able to wear white.”
“Have you told Mother?” Alana asked as she slid the dress from the padded hanger.
“Hmmm . . . no,” Freddie mused.
Alana hummed the Barney song under her breath as she took the gorgeous blue dress from the hanger and stepped into it. Freddie zipped her up. “It fits perfectly,” she said. “I’ll do your makeup.”
“Smoky eyes,” Alana said. She dug through her makeup bag until she found the right compact.
“Really? You usually never like that. You want modest and understated and demure.”
“Tonight I want smoky eyes,” she said.
Freddie applied eyeliner and shadow in shades of blue and gray, smudging both together, then touched up the tips of her lashes with mascara. “This isn’t about David, is it? Go with a pale lip gloss. Shine, not color.”
“I know that. This is about me,” she said as she uncapped the lip gloss.
She let her heels dangle from her fingers as she followed Freddie down the curving staircase to the entry hall. Freddie braced herself on Alana’s shoulder first to step into her stilettos, then stood still for Alana to do the same. Their mother hurried around the corner, issuing last-minute instructions to Nancy, her assistant
“You both look lovely,” her mother said. “It’s good to have you home, Alana.”
The correct answer to that was she was glad to be home, but somehow she couldn’t make herself say the words. “I missed you,” she said instead, because that was true.
But a truth was growing inside her, one she couldn’t ignore. This wasn’t home anymore. Walkers Ford was.
“Where’s the Senator?” Freddie asked.
“He’s meeting with David. They’ll join us at the hotel.”
They followed their mother out the front door and into a limousine. Inside, Freddie kicked her heels off. Alana watched the city slide by as they made their way to the Palmer House Hilton. She’d lived here off and on for her whole life, always considered it home, a place of possibility and opportunity, of change and industry and significance. But today the buildings hemmed her in. She missed the endless arc of sky. She missed the prairie, undulating to the horizon. She missed the wind buffeting the grasses into endlessly changing patterns and cross-hatching.
She missed the people. She missed Lucas so badly, she ached inside.
Her mother was preoccupied with her phone.
“You okay?” Freddie asked quietly.
“It’s been a very long day,” Alana said.
“You always feel something when you leave,” Freddie said finally. “It’s perfectly normal to like people, enjoy their company, feel sad when you move on to the next project.”
“You get entangled?”
Freddie shrugged. “Not really. That’s just what people say.”
“Don’t you ever want to just stay and make a difference in one place, to one group of people?”
“I never really thought about it,” Freddie admitted. “I like what I do. I like the pace, the dialogues, the global scale. I like knowing I’ve made a difference to thousands of people.”
“I know,” Alana said. But that’s not what I like. I liked seeing Cody come alive at the library. I liked sitting with Mrs. Battle at her doctor’s appointment. I liked making dinner for Lucas. I liked peeling back his layers, watching him struggle with who he was and what his life meant.
I needed him. But he doesn’t need anyone.
“Lannie,” Freddie said quietly.