Chapter 24: Home

On the morning of my twenty-third birthday I woke up to a brass band.

It was playing under the window of the flat.

Biscuit, who now weighed sixty pounds, stood on the bed with his front paws on the sill and barked at the tuba.

"He said nothing," Jonas said into the pillow. "Your father said nothing at all."

"He said nothing yet."

"I think this is yet."

I sat up in my own bed, in my own flat.

I wore a T-shirt that said BIRTHDAY GIRL IN CHARGE, which my father had ordered the week before.

The ring on my finger caught the light.

We had been engaged eleven months.

The wedding was set for spring, and Dominic had already tried to buy the church.

I opened the glass door in my bare feet.

The courtyard had been filled with yellow balloons.

There were hundreds of them, tied to every chair, every plant, every rail.

A banner stretched from the townhouse roof to the garage.

It said HAPPY BIRTHDAY ABBY, with the Y painted to look like a golden retriever.

My father stood at the center of it all in a navy suit and a paper hat.

He held a tray of pancakes with a candle in the top one.

"Eighty," he said. "I counted. Eat as many as you like. There are more in the car."

"Dad."

"Make a wish."

"What's in the car?"

"Another eighty pancakes," he said, "and a surprise. Blow."

I blew.

The band struck up.

Behind the band were people I had not expected to see.

The housekeeper, in a flowered dress, with her husband.

The security guard from the Garrow Tower lobby, who had once walked three people to the revolving door.

Keep reading free with an account. Start Her Billionaire Father Spoils Her Rotten from Chapter 1, then sign up free to read the rest of this chapter.