This, sadly, was true. Chip had played a large part in making Hamlet happen by distracting their parents on a day-long cruise on the Sutcliffe family boat, giving Spencer and Scarlett enough time to load in an entire cast and stage a show. He did this after Lola had broken up with him, no less.

“Look,” Lola said, when neither Spencer nor Scarlett responded to that statement. “Maybe…I don’t know. I want to stay. But I can’t stay here alone. And Marlene must have gone to a lot of effort, so, let’s just stay, okay? It’s a free dinner at our favorite restaurant. It could be worse. I’m just going to go to the ladies’ room, and then we’ll stay, okay? Okay?”

She accepted their stunned silence as a yes, nodded tersely, and tiptoed off to the ladies’ room behind her.

“This is so bad,” Spencer said, leaning up against the decorative old-fashioned gas pump behind him. “This is so, so bad…”

He trailed off, and his face stiffened into a neutral mask as Marlene dislodged Chip from the cactus and brought him over.

“Stay here,” she commanded them all. “I’ll get us a table.”

Chip had really outdone himself tonight, outfitwise. The pants were stripy, the shirt was a different color and seemed deliberately too small, the tie a different stripy still. Ridiculous as it was, there was no doubt in Scarlett’s mind that what Chip was wearing cost a fortune—that perhaps, if you touched him, an alarm would go off somewhere. Not that Scarlett had any plans on touching him.

He took a careful step in Spencer’s direction and extended a hand of greeting.

“What’s up?” he asked.

Chip seemed understandably nervous to be facing the Martins once again, because even he knew that Scarlett and Spencer weren’t his biggest fans. Scarlett’s dislike was fairly tepid, but Spencer genuinely couldn’t stand him and had never hidden that fact. Chip had no real personality; at least, Scarlett had never seen it. It may have been one of those things that stayed hidden most of the time, like a groundhog.

But that wasn’t the problem. Chip’s crime was something he couldn’t really help. He was rich. Seriously rich. Bona fide, centuryold, New York society, private school rich. To be fair to him, Chip never bragged about his wealth, nor did he appear to care that Lola and her family came from a totally different financial league. He was not snobbish. If anything, he acted like he’d recently landed on the planet and was charmed and fascinated by the things he found there. The magical underground “subway” train that transported people all over the city. Credit card limits. Doing your own laundry. Having a job. Chip gazed in wonderment at it all.