True Colors

Chapter 1: The Gala

The champagne had gone warm in Sadie Beaumont's hand twenty minutes ago, but she kept holding the flute like a prop because it gave her something to do besides smile at men who talked about themselves.

"So then I said to the governor, 'Bill, you can't possibly expect me to—'"

Sadie nodded at appropriate intervals while Preston Whitmore III continued his story about golf, or politics, or whatever intersection of the two he found so fascinating. She'd stopped listening around the time he mentioned his boat for the fourth time. The Magnolia Society's Summer Charity Gala attracted Charleston's finest every June, and by finest, Sadie had learned to mean richest and most tedious.

She was thirty-one years old and had attended this gala every year since she turned eighteen. The faces changed slightly—some died, some moved away, fresh money occasionally muscled in—but the conversations remained identical. Net worth disguised as small talk. Pedigree masquerading as charm.

"Excuse me," she said when Preston paused to breathe. "I need to freshen up."

She didn't wait for his response before turning toward the bathroom, though she had no intention of actually going there. Instead, she slipped through the French doors onto the veranda, where the June humidity wrapped around her like a damp shawl.

The Middleton estate sprawled before her, its gardens illuminated by thousands of fairy lights that made the Spanish moss glow silver. Beautiful, she thought. And suffocating.

"Rough night?"

Sadie turned. A man leaned against the brick wall, half-hidden in shadow. He held a beer bottle—an actual beer bottle, not a champagne flute—and wore a suit that fit him well but not expensively. Dark hair, a day past needing a cut. Eyes she couldn't quite make out in the dim light.

"That obvious?" she asked.

"You've got the look of someone who just escaped something." He stepped forward, and she saw his face properly now. Strong jaw, slight stubble, a smile that seemed genuine rather than practiced. "I'm Adam. Adam Wheeler."

"Sadie Beaumont."

If her name registered—and it should have, given that her family had been in Charleston since before it was Charleston—he didn't show it. No widening of the eyes, no subtle recalibration of his posture. He just nodded.

"Nice to meet you, Sadie. You want a real drink?" He gestured to a cooler tucked behind a potted fern. "I smuggled these in. The bartender looked at me like I'd asked for poison when I requested a beer."

She laughed—actually laughed, not the polite titter she'd perfected for events like these. "I would love a real drink."

He fished out a bottle, popped the cap against the brick wall with practiced ease, and handed it to her. Their fingers brushed, and Sadie felt something she hadn't felt in a long time: interested.

"So what brings you to the Magnolia Society's annual exercise in self-congratulation?" she asked, taking a long sip. The beer was cold and cheap and perfect.

"Work, sort of." He leaned back against the wall. "I just moved here from California. Tech stuff. Everyone says these events are where you make connections."

"And have you? Made connections?"

He grinned. "I'm making one right now."

Sadie rolled her eyes, but she smiled. "That was terrible."

"It was. I apologize. I'm usually smoother than that." He took a swig of his beer. "Truth is, I've been hiding out here for an hour. Everyone in there wants to know what my family does, where I went to school, what my grandfather's middle name was. I didn't realize Charleston had entrance exams."

"It does," Sadie said. "I'm sorry to say you're failing."

"Story of my life."

They talked for an hour. Then two. Adam told her about California, about the tech startup he was building, about his dream of creating something that actually helped people rather than just making money. He asked her questions—real questions, not the usual probing about her family's shipping fortune or her brother's political ambitions.

"What do you actually want to do?" he asked at one point. "Not what you're supposed to do. What you want."

Sadie blinked. No one had asked her that in years. Maybe ever.

"I want to design," she heard herself say. "Interiors. I took classes in college, but my mother thought it was..." She trailed off.

"Beneath you?"

"Something like that."

Adam shook his head. "That's ridiculous. If you love it, do it. Life's too short to live someone else's version of it."

By the time the gala wound down, Sadie had given Adam her phone number and agreed to have dinner with him on Friday. As she watched him disappear into the parking lot—walking, she noticed, not climbing into a luxury car—she felt something unfamiliar flutter in her chest.

Hope, maybe. Or the beginning of something like it.