Chapter 1

LOS ANGELES

There’s a zipper pull pressed directly into my spine. It’s matte white, sharp-cornered, a spiteful metal rectangle. I know because I spent eight sweaty minutes wrestling with it backstage, trying bitterly to tug it over the waistline seam of the flouncy, floral dress Magnolia set out for me. I got it settled between my shoulder blades seconds before Mags burst into my room and now it’s back to haunt me, piercing my vertebra like a punishment. Or a warning.

“That sounds like a good question for Audrey,” my mother says. She looks over at me, and in the hot stage lights dust motes float like pollen between us. “Honey?”

I lean forward in my blush velvet chair, the perfect aesthetic accompaniment to my mother’s mint-green one. Try to swipe at the zipper. Miss.

“Hmm?” I haven’t been paying attention, which is off-brand for me. But there’s something impersonal about this, personal as it’s meant to be. With two thousand people staring up at us, it nearly feels like no one is. Ten people, sure. Five, even more pressure. But two thousand? They may as well be fake—a soundless sea shifting in the dark beyond the glaring lights.

My mother laughs, the rehearsed titter that’s as familiar to me as the sound of my own name. “Laz asked what we’re proudest to share on the tour this summer.”

I look at him. Lazarus Leblanc: media darling, beach-chic tastemaker, he of the laminated eyebrows. My mother’s Malibu neighbor, and the exact kind of Los Angeles Ken doll to moderate an event like this. I’m 90 percent sure his legal name is Scott.

“Proudest,” I repeat. Laz cocks an eyebrow, tilts one ankle so his snakeskin boots catch their polish in the light. We’ve known each other for a lifetime, and not at all. “Hard to say.” It’s the easiest truth within reach. Because really, I left everything I’m proud of back at school. I boxed it up and hoisted it into a windowless container that’ll ship directly to my dorm in Baltimore mid-August, first day of freshman orientation, the minute my life picks back up. This is an interlude—this tour, this summer, this conversation on this stage—an exercise for my mother’s pride that has absolutely nothing to do with my own.

“Understandably so,” Laz says smoothly, “when there’s so much to be proud of. What about you, Camilla?”

My mother preens. I brace myself, watching every shift of her body like the adjustment of so many jewel-colored feathers. The level setting of her freckled collarbones. The blonde hair she tips over one shoulder, so lustrous it could be liquid. The calculated angle of her smile: the warm one, the one that invites you right in.

“I’m proudest to share my relationship with Audrey.” It’s the worst thing she could say, and the inevitable thing. She isn’t looking at me but instead at the audience—that dark, faceless sea. “To throw open the doors to our bond, and get real with our friends across the country about what it means to share a relationship as mothers and daughters, as parents and children, as women.”

Finally, she looks at me, our mirrored blue eyes meeting across the glossy, echoing stage. I can tell I’m supposed to be honored she’s called me a woman in front of all these people. Me, six months past eighteen. But I know what they don’t: that I have never been Camilla’s equal, and that she will never see me that way.

“She’s grown up with all of you,” my mother says, sweeping a delicate hand toward the audience. Her smile broadens. “And now, this summer, you’ll really meet her. Get to know her. See her the way I do.”

I have bristled down to my marrow, every cell inside me growing spikes to keep this out.

“How special,” she says. She leans back, letting her words settle in the rapt, reverent air. “What an undeniable thing of beauty.”

Applause rises from the audience for absolutely nothing. The wall-to-wall screen behind us illuminates and I turn to see my own face, gridded out like a gallery. Photos of me stretching back over a decade, my mother’s social media handles bolded in the upper corner of each one. Me at seven, holding a palm-sized turtle in Camilla’s sloping yard. Me at eleven, casting a backward glance from the steps to my dorm at the Summit School, the year she launched Saint and sent me to boarding school. Me two days ago, robed and capped, standing next to Ethan at graduation.

All those Audreys compiled like postage stamps for my mother’s collection. I don’t recognize myself in a single photo.

I blink up at the screen. I lean back so the zipper gnashes my bones. I think, Who are you?

And then I run.