“Good, now that’s settled. Hopefully, in a few months, this will be nothing more than a lovely story someone tells a kid in trouble about rising from adversity. ‘If Olivia Monroe could get arrested as a teenager and later be the founding partner at one of the top law firms in Los Angeles, you can, too!’ they’ll say.”

Max followed her into the kitchen.

“One of the top law firms in Los Angeles, huh?” he said.

She took leftover pizza out of the refrigerator.

“People always told me to dream big, you know.”

Chapter Eighteen

Max was home for the weekend a week later—the last weekend before August recess—and he had to admit Olivia had been right. Maybe because they’d been boring, or maybe because much bigger news had knocked them out of the headlines, but the stories about them had almost completely died down. Random pictures of Olivia still popped up from time to time—once heading into the community center, another time walking into the gym—but even the paparazzi didn’t care about them anymore after those first few awful days.

They still took precautions—Olivia had swapped cars with different friends to make it harder to follow her; she and Ellie had hired a temp for a few weeks to answer their phones; and Max had stopped going to her house, for fear the press would discover where she lived. But other than all of that, life had mostly returned to normal.

Max looked over at her, in her spot in the corner of his couch, and smiled. That line of tension that had been there on her forehead for the past month had faded. But … her shoulders still looked too tense as she hunched over her phone.

What she needed was a vacation.

Wait. Yes. What they both needed was a vacation! Max pulled up his calendar on his phone and smiled.

“What are you doing next weekend?” he asked.

Olivia sat up and narrowed her eyes at him.

“I sort of assumed I’d be here—why, are you gone then? I thought your town halls didn’t start until the second week of August.”

His staff had built in a few days of break for him, which he hadn’t had time to think about until just this moment.

“This last month has been so hard, and I think we deserve an actual vacation,” he said.

A smile spread across Olivia’s face.

“What do you have in mind?”

Max grinned at her.

“Hawaii.”

Olivia’s mouth dropped open.

“Hawaii? For just the weekend?”

Max shook his head.

“For, let’s say … five days, if you can manage it? I get back here from DC on Thursday night, God willing—we can leave Friday morning, and come back, like … Tuesday night. I know the office has been pretty busy lately—can you take a few days off?”