Chapter 2  Thinking About Him

Lilian.

I did not think about him.

That was what I told myself the next morning, standing in the practice room with my violin under my chin, the sheet music for my recital piece propped in front of me. I did not think about broad shoulders or cold eyes or a voice flat enough to cut glass. I thought about Bach. I thought about the third movement, the one I still had not gotten quite right, and nothing else.

I played the first phrase and stopped. Played it again and stopped again. On the third try I realized I had been staring at the same four bars for almost ten minutes without actually hearing a single note in my head.

"This is ridiculous," I muttered, setting the bow down.

My phone buzzed on the stand. Anne.

“Lunch? I need details.”

I did not want to give her details, mostly because I did not have any that made sense, but I also did not trust myself alone in a practice room with my brain circling the same square inch of memory over and over, so I grabbed my coat and met her at the small café across from the conservatory twenty minutes later.

"So," Anne said, sliding into the booth across from me, "he watched you leave. He stood outside in the cold and watched your car pull away. That is not nothing, Lilian."

"It is nothing. He was probably annoyed I spilled his drink on myself and wanted to make sure I was actually leaving."

"You spilled nothing on yourself. He spilled on you."

"Details."

Anne gave me a look over the top of her menu, the kind that said she was not buying a single word of it. "I asked Michael about him last night."

My stomach did something unpleasant and small. "I did not ask you to do that."

"I know you did not ask. I did it anyway, because that is what best friends are for." She set the menu down, clearly pleased with herself. "Michael said Drake does not come to those parties. Ever. He shows up for the mandatory sponsor stuff and leaves within the hour. Last night he stayed almost two hours."

"That means nothing."

"He also said Drake does not talk to people at those things. Not really. He stands in a corner with his team and answers questions in one sentence and leaves. He does not linger. He definitely does not follow anyone outside."

I picked at the edge of my napkin, tearing a small strip off the corner without meaning to. "Maybe he was having an off night."

"Or maybe," Anne said, leaning forward, "you made an impression."

"I made him spill a drink on me and then insulted him in front of half the room. That is not the kind of impression people usually chase after."

"You clearly do not know men like Drake." She stole a fry from my plate, entirely unrepentant. "Men like that get told yes their entire lives. You told him no without even trying. That is rare currency."

I did not answer, because I did not have a good answer, and because some small, traitorous part of me was still thinking about the way his jaw had tightened right before I walked away, like I had actually managed to get under all that expensive, polished indifference.

I hated that part of me a little.

We finished lunch and I walked back to the conservatory alone, determined to lose myself back in the third movement and forget the entire conversation had happened. I made it as far as the front hallway before I noticed the crowd gathered near the announcement board, students clustered together, whispering.

"What is going on?" I asked, edging closer.

A girl from my ensemble class turned around, practically vibrating with excitement. "They are renovating the west wing. New practice rooms, new recital hall, state-of-the-art everything. It is fully funded."

"Funded by who?"

She pointed at the flyer pinned to the board, and I felt the floor tilt slightly under my feet before I even read the name printed at the bottom in bold, confident letters. Apex Racing. Drake's team.

Of course.

Of course, the one place I went to escape from everything, the one space that had always belonged entirely to me and my music, now had his name stitched into its foundation. I stood there staring at the flyer until someone bumped my shoulder apologizing, and I mumbled something back and walked away without really seeing where I was going.

"It does not mean anything," I told myself out loud, alone in the elevator. "It is a business decision. It has nothing to do with me."

I almost believed it.

For the rest of the week I threw myself into practice with a kind of ferocity I had not managed since before the breakup, arriving early, leaving late, running the same passages until my fingers ached and my mind finally, blessedly, went quiet. I did not think about him. I told Anne so at least three times a day, and she stopped arguing with me out loud, though the look on her face said everything her mouth did not.

It almost worked.

Then on Thursday evening, my phone buzzed while I was packing up my violin case, an email notification lighting up the screen. I almost ignored it, assuming it was another mass announcement about the renovation, but something made me open it.

The sender line read Apex Racing, Executive Office.

My hands went still on the clasp of my case.

I opened the email and read it twice, then a third time, because the words did not fully register the first two attempts. It was short. It did not ask. It informed me that a representative from the conservatory board had recommended me, along with two other students, to perform at a private fundraising event for Apex Racing's new wing, and that Drake himself had personally requested my inclusion, along with a date, a time, and a line at the bottom that made my stomach twist tight.

“I look forward to hearing you play.”

No question mark. No option to decline built into the wording at all. It read less like an invitation and more like something already decided, something I was simply being informed of rather than asked about, and I sat there staring at his name signed neatly beneath those final words with my heart hammering somewhere up near my throat, with absolutely no idea how I was supposed to say no to a man who clearly did not expect anyone to try.