Chapter 0240
The evening of the fundraising gala, Elva and I changed into our glistening golden dresses and waited in the parlor with the other candidates for Nathan to come and bring us to the event.
We stood near Susie for a while, but she was distracted. She had prepared notecards for her pitch, as well as some responses to questions she might be asked. She read through them aloud, over and over.
“I’ll hide them up my sleeve if I have to,” she said, when I asked her about them.
Elva twisted and turned, catching light on her puffy shirts. Then she tried to catch it with her hands. She
giggled at her own antics. “So pretty…” she whispered to herself.
“Piper. Speak with us.”
I glanced up to see Veronica approaching, with Tiffany close behind.
My nerves spiked, and I worried they had seen Jane again. But when I looked closer at Tiffany, she
wasn’t carrying her tension in quite the same way she had the previous two times she approached me.
This time, she seemed more excited than anxious.
“What did you want to talk about?” I asked, forcing myself calm.
“How we should split Julian’s time during the gala,” Tiffany said. The two came to stand before Elva and
me. Tiffany waved at Elva, smiling. Elva blinked up at her and shyly waved back.
his time evenly would be the most logical,”
It would be fruitless to
well.”
to
it would put Julian
nod. “Julian shouldn’t need to
! had dealt with, aside from Susie, these
than their
as well as incredibly grateful that they were the ones I
now. At least,
a conversation of their
conversation with them would go half so
take the first hour with Julian,” Veronica said. “Then Tiffany. Then
I both
candidate win,”
to,” she said, deadpan. A tense moment passed,
curled up into a smile. She’d been
burst into a
too, just a little. One of my few real smiles since Jane held a knife to my throat. I knew
to smile a lot tonight, to win over the benefactors, so I had been practicing
that looked the most
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