nothing matters but you • sabrina carpenter

Chapter 4

She was gone.

Sabrina stood in the front yard of her house, analyzing the street. The entire block was filled with cars. She could have been in any one of them, just sitting there, trying to get out of the traffic. Or she could be in one of the three cars that had just escaped the cluster and turned around the corner.

Either way, she was gone.

And Sabrina knew that she had no intention of letting be with her again.

Sabrina cursed harshly under her breath. With all of the women she'd met in her life, she'd never once felt the same connection that was fierce between her and the woman in orange. From the moment Sabrina'd seen her, the air had this intenseness to it, this expectation and tension and excitement. And Sabrina had felt a way she hadn't felt in years, as if she'd awoken to a whole new world and everything was shiny and amazing and full of dreams.

But...

Sabrina cursed again, this time her voice was laced with regret.

If she'd truly found the woman of her dreams, the one that actually made her want a family, then she should at least know when the next time she would be able to look into her brown eyes again was. Or even if she would look into those brown eyes again; perhaps she had just lost the love of her life—forever.

It wasn't going to be easy at all to find her. It was never easy to find someone who very clearly didn't want to be found, and the woman had been abundantly clear that her identity was a secret.

Sabrina didn't even have enough true clues to go by...

She looked down at the pavement below her, and then remembered how on the back of the dress, there had been initials. She thought hard to remember what they were. Maybe it was a clue.

ESB. That was it. They had to be someone's initials.

Maybe they were hers?

She remembered that there was also a family crest next to the initials, but Sabrina didn't recognize it or even anything about it.

But maybe her mother would. Her mother typically knew about all the families living in their county, for the most part. And if she knew the crest, then she'd probably know who ESB was.

Sabrina felt a twinge of hope in her chest. She was going to find her.

She would find her, and she would make her hers. She had to.

It took barely thirty minutes to return Ivy to her usual, boring look. The dress was gone, the sparkling earrings. The slippers were placed neatly back in Christopher's closet, and the lipstick Eva stole from Elswyn was back where it belonged.

Ivy looked like she always did before bed—plain, boring, and unexciting. Her hair was tucked behind her shoulders, hanging naturally and flat.

She was back to looking like her truthful self—a simple housemaid. She was a fairy for one brief evening, and now it was all gone.

And the saddest part of it all, her fairy princess was gone, too.

Sabrina Carpenter had been everything she'd read on social media. Beautiful, elegant, polite. She was straight out of someone's dreams, but she would never be out of Ivy's dreams. A woman like that didn't marry someone like Ivy.

But for a few hours, she'd been hers, and Ivy guessed that had to be enough for her.

She crawled into bed, hugging a pillow to her chest, and pulled the blanket over herself.