Chapter One — The Suitable Date

From behind the wheel of the idling car, Gwen Aldous watched Sam come down the dormitory steps in the rented tuxedo and felt something in her chest pull tight that she couldn't quite name.

He looked wrong in it. Not badly — the fit was good, she'd guessed his measurements three sizes of assumption ahead of asking — but wrong the way a borrowed accent is wrong, a costume worn by someone too honest to disappear into it. Sam Doyle in black tie still moved like Sam Doyle: shoulders a little squared against the cold, hands shoved in his pockets, taking the steps two at a time like a man who'd never in his life been told to slow down and be seen.

Sam never had time to slow down. He was at Blackwick on scholarship, and he worked a part-time job to make ends meet — a campus-services lanyard hung on a hook just inside his door. Three nights a week he ran a floor buffer through the marble halls of Aldous Library, which her great-great-grandfather had paid to build and which still had the family name cut over the entrance in letters a foot high. He had never once mentioned that to her, the library, though he must have known. That was the thing about Sam. He never once mentioned any of it.

He dropped into the passenger seat and pulled the door shut against the October dark, and the whole car suddenly smelled like rented wool and the cheap good soap he used.

"You're sure about this," he said. He plucked at the lapel like it might bite him. "Because I've never worn anything this expensive in my life. If I spill so much as a drop of wine on this, Gwen, I swear I'm taking extra shifts for a month to pay it off."

"You're not paying for anything." She put the car in gear. "And nobody's going to make you. That's sort of the entire point of tonight."

"Gwen, I'm not taking your money."

"You're doing me a favor. And I'll take care of any spilled wine. Don't try to fight me for it."

He laughed — that easy unbothered laugh of his, the one she'd first heard two years ago when she'd been crying in a stairwell over an exam and a custodian worth a fraction of her family's net worth had sat down on the step below her, not above, and said that bad, huh, and shared a terrible vending-machine coffee with her until she could breathe again. He hadn't known who she was. When he found out, three weeks into being friends, he hadn't changed by a single degree — hadn't gotten careful, hadn't gotten grabby, hadn't started angling for the things people always started angling for once they learned what Aldous meant. He'd just said huUH, the way you'd react to finding out someone was left-handed, and kept being exactly who he was.

That was why she'd asked him. Not because he needed the favor — Sam never took favors, you practically had to trick him into letting you buy him lunch — but because in two years at Blackwick he was the one person she trusted with the thing she was about to do. The only one.

She drove them out past the old quad, where the bell tower stood black against a blacker sky and the path lamps made small gold pools on stone that had been there four hundred years. Blackwick wore its age like the families wore theirs — quietly, certain it would never have to explain itself. To everyone outside the gates it was just an absurdly old, absurdly rich New England university, ivy and endowment and a hockey team. To the people inside the gates who mattered, in the particular Blackwick sense of the word, it was something older and more closed than that. A keeper of arrangements. A place where certain families had been sending certain children for two hundred years for reasons the brochures did not cover.

"All right," she said, when the dorms were behind them. "We're moving. Ask your questions."

***

"Walk me through it again," Sam said. "The whole thing. Pretend I'm slow."

"You're not slow."

"Pretend."

She breathed out. She had told him already — twice, once over the lunch he'd grudgingly let her buy and again the night before, in a quiet study room in the library — but she understood the impulse to hear a frightening plan said out loud one more time before you stepped into it.

"It's the Founders' dinner," she said. "The Harwick Compact does it every autumn. You won't have heard of the Compact, and that's correct — you're not supposed to have. Officially it's an alumni society, a philanthropic thing, very old, founded in 1889. Unofficially it's the machine that's kept the same dozen families braided into this university since before there were cars. My family is one of them. My grandmother lives for this dinner every year."

"Okay."

"The Founders' dinner is where the families show themselves to each other once a year. Who's risen, who's slipped, whose children are turning out. And there's a thing at the center of it — they don't call it this, but that's what it is — about continuance. The bloodlines. Whose line is going forward and how. The whole evening is one long quiet audit of the future of the old families." Her hands tightened on the wheel. "And part of being audited, if you're a girl my age and an Aldous, is that you are expected to arrive on the arm of someone suitable. A young man of the right kind of family. It's how you signal that your line continues. That you're a safe place to put the future."

"Right," Sam said. "And you don't have one of those."

"I have never had one of those." She kept her eyes on the road. "It's not — Sam, it isn't that there weren't offers. My grandmother has produced a parade of suitable young men since I was sixteen. Claverings and Whitmores and a truly unbearable Ashford. Believe me, the supply of suitable boys is not the problem."

"Then what's—" He stopped. She felt him look at her. He was quicker than people gave the floor-buffer kid credit for.

"The problem," she said, to the windshield, "is that I have never once found one I wanted. Not one. And the longer I sit through these dinners, the less I can stand the whole archaic shape of it — that I should have to manufacture a suitor at all. That I should have to stand next to some boy I don't respect, let alone love, and smile, so a room full of people can feel reassured about my bloodline, like I'm a mare with good papers." Her hands tightened on the wheel. "I shouldn't have to. Nobody should."

That was true. All of it was true. It simply wasn't the whole of it, and the whole of it she kept where she always kept it — folded up small and silent behind her sternum, in the place she didn't open in moving cars or anywhere else. Because the real reason was simpler and far more dangerous than any objection to tradition. It wasn't that she hadn't found the right man. It was that there was no right man to find, and there never would be. What she wanted — what she had always wanted, since long before she'd let herself put the word to it — was a girl. She had never once said that sentence aloud in her life. She was not going to start now, in the dark, an hour out from the single room on earth where it could do the most damage.

Sam was quiet for a moment, watching the headlights unspool the lane ahead. "You shouldn't have to do any of it," he said finally. Simple, certain, like a remark about the weather. And then he let it sit — didn't ask the next question, the obvious one, the so what is it you do want, then — just let the silence stay a silence and looked out at the dark with her.

She was grateful for it, the way she was always grateful for the things Sam somehow knew not to reach for. His manners, she told herself. Just his good, plain manners. She put both hands back on the wheel and let the unasked question dissolve into the night.

"Okay," she said, after a while. "Now for the rings."

She nodded at the small box sitting on the console between them, and Sam picked it up and opened it. Two plain dark bands lay inside on a square of old velvet, a matched pair, nearly identical. He'd seen them last night in the library, but he looked at them again the way you look at something you're about to trust with your skin.

"You know all this," she said — and she did know he knew; she said it anyway, for her own nerves as much as anything, walking the plan out loud one more time. "They're a family heirloom. My great-grandmother was given them when she was a student here, at Blackwick, a hundred years ago — by someone in the Compact, the story's gone soft around the edges. They've passed down ever since, mother to daughter. They've sat in a box in my mother's dressing room my whole life, and nobody's worn them since my great-grandmother died, because of what they do."

"Which is the part," Sam said, "that I'm choosing to believe because it's you telling me."

"They change a person. Their appearance. One ring directs, one ring receives." She tapped the band already on her own hand, then the twin still in the box. "Whoever wears the directing ring can shape whoever wears the other one — features, build, all of it — and hold it there by will. I'm going to wear this one. You're going to wear that one. And I'm going to turn you into the appropriate suitor for the night." She took a breath. "I'll be honest with you, the way I was last night: I don't fully understand them. I've got my great-grandmother's notes and what Della told me and that's the whole of my education. I've tested it. It works. But I can't promise you I know where the edges are."

"Della's the one who helped you get them out."

"Della's been my family's housekeeper since before I was born. She — " Gwen's throat did something complicated. "She figured me out years before I had words for it. She never said a thing, she just knew, and when I told her I needed the rings and couldn't explain why, she went into my mother's dressing room and got them and put them in my hand and said be careful, and bring them home. She understood. She's the only one in that whole house who ever has."

She pulled the car off the lane into the dark beneath the bare trees, a hundred yards short of the hall, where the windows already glowed gold and the first cars were disgorging the first furs. She put it in park. She did not turn off the engine.

"So here's the whole of it," she said, turning to face him. "I'm going to put the other ring on you. And I'm going to change you — not into a disguise, into a person. A young man no one in that room has ever seen, from no family they can place, so that when I introduce you there's nothing for anyone to grab onto. If I walked Sam Doyle in there, half of them would know your face from the library and the other half would spend the night working out exactly what you are and why I'd brought you, and it would be worse than coming alone." She softened. "I need you to be a stranger. A handsome, forgettable, entirely suitable stranger on my arm for three hours. And then we go home and I put the rings back in the box and it never happened."

Sam looked down at the ring in the box, then back at her. "You're sure this isn't going to hurt?"

"I don't think so," she said. "But we're going to find out — if you're still willing."

He held out his hand, palm up, without a beat of hesitation.

"Trust me?" she asked.

"With my life," he said, like it was obvious. "Always have. Put it on."

She slid the ring onto his finger. Plain dark band, heavier than it looked. Its mate was already on her own hand, and the moment the pair was complete she felt the connection close between them like a circuit, a low warmth running ring to ring.

"This might feel strange," she said. "Try not to fight it."

"Wasn't planning to."

She had pictured him already. Lying awake the night before, she'd built the young man piece by piece the way you'd describe someone to a sketch artist — older than Sam by a year or two, taller, the kind of jaw the Whitmore boys had, dark hair worn a little long in the way the Compact set thought of as artistic and therefore acceptable, a face handsome enough to be plausible on her arm and bland enough to slide straight out of memory. She fixed that picture in her mind, and she pressed it down the warm thread between the rings, and she willed it onto him.

The change came over Sam like a tide coming in.

It started at his jaw. She watched the faint roughness of it smooth and the line firm and square, settling into something cut clean and certain. His hair darkened a half-shade and lengthened, falling into an artful sweep he'd never have bothered with himself. She watched the small white scars she knew on his knuckles — work scars, real ones — go pale and then go entirely, the hands lengthening, refining, becoming hands that had never run a buffer down a marble hall in their life. His shoulders drew back and widened a degree inside the rented jacket until the jacket stopped looking rented and started looking his. Even the way he sat reorganized itself under her attention — the wary economy of a boy who'd learned to take up as little room as possible unspooling, limb by limb, into the loose entitled ease of someone who had never once in his life been told he didn't belong.

She held the picture steady and shaped him to it, degree by degree, and it was easier than it should have been — the ring seemed almost eager, leaning into her intention, filling in the parts she hadn't thought to specify with a fluency that was its own small chill. In perhaps ten seconds it was done.

The young man in the passenger seat was a stranger. A good-looking, well-bred, completely unremarkable stranger, exactly as designed. And Gwen sat very still, because under the satisfaction was something that surprised her — a thread of guilt, sharp and unexpected, that she had reached into her friend and rubbed out the scars and the carefulness and every honest mark of the actual life he lived, just so a room full of people who'd never deserve to know him would find him acceptable. She'd erased Sam. That had been the whole assignment, and she'd done it well, and it sat in her like a swallowed stone.

"There," she said, more quietly than she meant to.

The stranger blinked, lifted one of the new unfamiliar hands, and turned it over in the dashboard light. Then he reached up and tilted the rearview mirror toward himself, and went still looking at the face that wasn't his.

"Huh," he said. The voice came out lower than Sam's, smoother, a stranger's voice with just the ghost of him underneath it. He tipped his head, considering. "How do I look?"

"Suitable," she said. The word tasted strange. "You look suitable, Sam."

The stranger's mouth — that wasn't Sam's mouth, but the grin that crossed it absolutely was — curved up at one corner. He pushed the mirror back into place.

"Tonight," he said, "you'd better call me Samuel. It sounds more uppity. More like a fella who belongs at this thing." He sat up a little straighter, doing a passable impression of every Whitmore she'd ever suffered through a dinner beside.

"Uppity." She bit back a smile despite everything. "You are not uppity."

"Gwendolyn." He laid a hand over his heart, mock-wounded. "I am the most uppity. I summer somewhere. I have opinions about boat hulls. I find this Pinot insolent."

"You most certainly are not — "

"I most certainly am."

A laugh got out of her, real and surprised, the first easy thing she'd felt all day, and the guilty stone in her chest loosened just enough to let her breathe. She reached over and straightened his collar with two fingers, the way she'd straighten a real date's, and let her hand rest there a half-second longer than she needed to.

"Careful, Samuel," she said, soft and playful, "or I'll change my mind and turn you into something else entirely. A footman. A coat rack. A particularly handsome lamp."

"You wouldn't. You need an arm." He looked at her then — really looked, for the first time since he'd gotten in the car — and whatever performance he'd been building dropped clean off his face for a second. "You look incredible, Gwen," he said, plain and unguarded, the way Sam looked at things he found beautiful. "Like you're about to win a war."

The compliment landed somewhere she didn't let herself examine. She'd dressed for the opposite of being seen: the deep midnight-blue gown was the kind of thing a girl wore when she wanted the eye to land on the dress and slide right off the girl, and the diamonds at her throat were real and old and cold, her grandmother's, and her dark hair was pinned up to leave the long clean line of her neck for the room to approve of. Armor, all of it. Built to be looked at and never quite seen. Sam had looked at it and seen her anyway. He always did, which was the entire problem and the entire point of him.

"I'm about to survive a dinner," she said. "Same thing, where I'm from." She turned the key the rest of the way and killed the engine, and for one last second she sat in the dark with the only person who knew the truth about her. "Ready?"

Instead of answering, he got out.

She watched the stranger she'd made come around the front of the car through the path-lamp light, unhurried, easy in the rented black tie as though he'd been born in it. He opened her door and offered her his hand. She took it — and let him hand her up out of the low seat, the gesture so natural she half forgot he had never once done it before — and when she was standing he settled her hand into the crook of his arm.

"Lead the way, Gwendolyn," he said, the easy smile fixed in place and Sam's steady eyes looking out from behind the stranger's. "Let's go be suitable."

Together they crossed into the cold gold light, and Gwen Aldous walked her best friend through the doors of the Harwick Compact's Founders' dinner, and for one whole hour, it was the loveliest lie she had ever told.

[End of Chapter One]