The trick to crashing the Ashford garden party, Ivy had learned, was to arrive as if you were the reason everyone else had come.
She stepped out of a borrowed white convertible at precisely four o'clock — late enough to look careless, early enough to be seen. The invitation in her clutch was real, technically. Third-hand, purchased from a junior associate at her firm who owed her a favor, but real. In this world, everything that mattered was technically real.
Ashford Hall rose behind the croquet lawn like a wedding cake left out in the sun: limestone, ivy, four generations of money pretending to be weather. Ivy smoothed her dress — champagne-colored, backless, expensive in a way that suggested inheritance rather than salary — and did not look at the heir.
That was the first rule. Never look at the target first. Let the target look at you.
She collected a flute of champagne from a passing tray, positioned herself at the exact intersection of the rose garden path and the bar — a spot she had selected from the party's floor plan, which she had requested from the event company under the pretense of a press feature — and waited.
Forty minutes. She discussed climate philanthropy with a senator's wife. She complimented an elderly duchess on her pearls, which were fake, and watched the old woman decide to love her forever. She laughed at the right moments, agreed with nothing, and gave away nothing.
At forty-three minutes, a shadow detached itself from the croquet lawn.
"You're standing in the sun," said Julian Ashford, holding out the only umbrella on the estate.
Ivy turned with the unhurried surprise of a woman who had never once checked a clock. Up close, the heir to the Ashford fortune had his mother's jaw and his father's tired, kind eyes. The tabloids called him the Last Eligible Bachelor in America. His family called him, in her presence, nothing at all, because she had not yet been introduced.
"Am I?" Ivy glanced up at the sun as if noticing it for the first time. "How careless of me."
"I'd hate for you to freckle," he said.
"Too late." She smiled. "Freckled women read books. You'd be charming to a freckled woman."
Julian laughed — surprised into it, which was the only kind that counted — and somewhere across the lawn, his mother set down her binoculars.
That evening, when the string quartet began, Julian Ashford raised his glass to Ivy Lane in front of two hundred people. She lifted her champagne and did not drink. You never drank at your own coronation.
"A toast," he said. "To the most interesting stranger of the season."
The stranger clinked her flute against his, and thought, You have no idea, my darling, how long I've been practicing this toast.
Three days later, an envelope arrived at her walk-up apartment in Hell's Kitchen, heavy as a bribe and cream as a lie. An invitation to the Ashford family weekend.
Ivy packed. She took only the dresses that looked poor in the right way — the way that said my family simply had style.