Re: The woods Shallow? But maybe that made sense. Maybe this version of Thomas had never connected with anyone, and maybe he married shallow women for that reason alone. Maybe he'd wanted children. It was possible, wasn't it? Though she didn't know how Max would be effected by her not existing. Thomas, yes, she could put that together fairly easily. If she hadn't been shopping with Luke all those years back, at the very beginning, after his adoption, then maybe they wouldn't have been somewhere he could have been kidnapped for ransom. Maybe that one, tiny thing could have changed everything after. Life could be like dominoes, and maybe that one thing had changed everything. It was possible. Or, if not that, then something along the line. She'd crossed passed with Thomas Brandon plenty of times, and some tiny thing might have changed everything. Even a tiny little thing like Jack, maybe. She'd met him first, hadn't she? Maybe that somehow changed things with him and Max, if that one thing didn't happen.
She was quiet through all her introspection, and she said nothing as the woman tried to remember Thomas' wife's name. But she recognized the way the woman's eyes lit up at the potential gossip that Wren might be in possession of, and she knew better than to believe that sugared sweetness for even a second. But she'd played this game. She'd played it in order to get enough money to blackmail someone, and she'd played it to get herself rich husbands as clients, ones who could afford her at eight thousand dollars an hour. "I did," she assured the purring woman, her voice dropping into her own, icily conspiratorial whisper. "Maybe no one's close to him now," she said, letting the implication take root.
She would have kept it up, but then the woman mentioned a friend in jail, and that was enough to turn the carefully icy composure into something genuinely curios, and entirely too earnestly young for this crowd. "A friend?" she asked, and the question itself made her uncomfortable, made this all feel like less of a game all of a sudden. She gave the woman a politely distant smile when the possibility of stories was brought up, but she couldn't keep the distance when the woman mentioned insatiable appetites. Okay, something was wrong here. "What kinds of insatiable appetites?" she asked with the cadence of someone who knew far too much about insatiable appetites, the facade slipping another notch.
She wasn't surprised when the man - Andrew? - interrupted again, but she didn't pay him very much attention, too focused on the woman and her approaching friend. The woman was beautiful, and the gown of gauzy gold captured Wren's attention and held it for a second, before she turned her attention back to Elisa, who now had a name to go along with the purple dress. "Tasha," she repeated politely, a regal inclination of her head and nothing so tawdry as a hand reaching out in greeting. "Wren," she said, because she didn't exist here, and there was no point in giving a fake name she might forget. And she almost argued that, no, she wasn't dying to meet Mister Brandon anymore, thank you.
But Tasha was explaining, and Wren was focusing on the same thing Luke was. Thomas' father had been dead long before she'd met him, and long before Luke had. But that wasn't the odd thing; the odd thing was that she knew Thomas was too private to discuss his family openly, at least the Thomas Brandon she'd known would have been. "What makes you say she looked like a bitch?" she asked, but the question was a distracted one, and when Tasha suggested introducing Elisa to someone, Wren told them she was going to find the powder room.
She was happy to see them go, and she turned to Luke just as he grabbed her hand and tugged on it urgently. "No, Luke, I don't think we should," she said, still not entirely sure of anything beyond the fact that they shouldn't be here. "In that movie, the one I mentioned-" she began, but he was begging, and she couldn't deny him anything when he begged. She just stared at him for a very long moment, grey eyes serious and worried, and then she gave him a tiny nod. "Okay."