I had about half an hour before Brougham was due to arrive for round two. Even though he’d given me way less time to prepare than I would’ve liked—while simultaneously ruining my potentially romantic night with Brooke—at least I’d been able to grab a notebook from the staff supplies closet at school. That was a start, right? Now, to work on the personalized plan for His Lordship of Demands and Condescension, Alexander Brougham the First.

I shoved my laptop backward on my desk to make room for the notebook, then opened it to page one. After some thought, I settled on a title page.

THE EX-GIRLFRIEND GETTER-BACKER EXPERIMENT

STARRING:

DARCY PHILLIPS—A LITERAL MIRACLE WORKER

ALEXANDER BROUGHAM—SINGLE, BUT NOT QUITE READY TO MINGLE

I devoted a few minutes to decorating it with hearts, lips, sparkles, and stars, until I felt too guilty to keep procrastinating. Okay, all right, focus. I decided to start with a list of things I knew about Brougham. That seemed like a good bouncing-off point.

Character Analysis:

Alexander Brougham

Thinks he’s much hotter than he is.

Total entitled asshole.

No wonder Winona left him.

No ability to problem solve, because he usually solves issues by throwing unlimited cash at them until they go away.

Doesn’t care about anyone but himself!

After a moment’s thought, I ripped this page out and crumpled it up. Better not let Brougham see that one. But this helped. Well, helped in that I now knew what we had to devote today’s session to: information gathering. A relationship assessment, or postmortem, if you will. I couldn’t begin to help Brougham until I knew what went right in the first place, as well as what went wrong.

Energized, I darted down the hall to Ainsley’s room. Again, the air was clogged with vanilla and caramel. Kneeling on her plush carpet, surrounded by scissors and scraps of fabric and sewing patterns, was Ainsley. Apparently, she’d started work on her next creation the moment she got home from class.

A lot of the time she kept her door closed so she could film her next YouTube video in peace. Once I’d burst in on her during what was meant to be a time-lapse take, and she’d raged at me so dramatically our neighbor poked her head over the fence to check no one was hurt. But her open door now was my green light, so I went in without hesitation, carefully stepping around the bomb site of material and errant clothespins. “What are you working on?” I asked.