6. Delphine #2
“Everything about Heath is my business.” Kendall stepped closer, her perfume washing over me, cloying and sweet. “It always has been. You’re just the woman who got in the way for a little while.”
She reached out and took the gold box from my hands. Not a snatch. Nothing so vulgar as a snatch. She lifted it out of my grip the way you lift a napkin off a table, smiling the whole time, and to anyone watching from six feet away it looked like two women admiring a present.
“Give that back.” My voice came out low and dangerous.
“Why? What’s in here that’s so important?” Kendall turned her shoulder, angling us both away from the room, and pulled at the ribbon with her manicured fingers.
She had already done the arithmetic. That was the thing about Kendall that I had spent nine years underestimating. She was not stupid. She had never once been stupid. She knew exactly how much of this room she wanted watching, and the answer was none of it.
I reached for it and she turned again, unhurried, and lifted the lid.
For one terrible moment her face went blank. Then she looked at the two tests lying there in their tissue, and at the booties beside them, and what moved behind her eyes I’ll be seeing for the rest of my life.
“Oh,” she breathed.
She stepped in close. Close enough that her perfume was the whole world. Close enough that her mouth was almost at my ear, and her voice dropped soft and warm, pitched for exactly one person.
“Two of them,” she murmured. “How thorough. More bastards coming soon, then. You’ll want to open a farm.”
“Shut up.” My voice came out low, because hers had been low, and God help me, even then I was still protecting the room from us. “Give me that and shut your mouth.”
“Does he know?” She was smiling now, warm and social, a woman having a lovely time at a party. From across the ballroom we would have looked like friends. “He doesn’t, does he. Oh, Delphine. You were going to trap him with a bastard and you couldn’t even manage to do it in time.”
She closed the lid, still smiling. She held the box against her chest like it was hers.
“Don’t worry,” she said. “I won’t tell him. I wouldn’t dream of it. This is going to be so much better if he finds out from somebody else.”
“I said shut up.”
“And it isn’t his, is it.” Still soft. Still smiling. Still for me alone. “It can’t be. He hasn’t touched you in months. I’d know, Delphine. I’m the one who’s been keeping his side of the bed warm.”
The rage exploded out of me before I could stop it.
I pulled back my arm and punched her directly in the face.
The impact jarred through my knuckles, through my wrist, up into my shoulder. Kendall’s head snapped back. Blood sprayed from her nose in a bright arc. She screamed, a high thin sound of shock and pain, and stumbled backward with her hands flying to her face.
The gold box fell from her fingers and landed at my feet. The lid held. Thank God, the lid held.
I stood there, my hand throbbing, my chest heaving, watching Kendall stagger and moan and bleed all over her designer dress.
The room had gone silent around us. Every person at the gala had turned to stare, their champagne glasses frozen halfway to their lips, their faces a mixture of shock and horrified fascination.
Montana was shrieking words I couldn’t process. Kendall was crying now, actual tears mixing with the blood running down her chin.
And the whole ballroom was looking at me.
At the woman in the borrowed red dress who had just broken a guest’s nose over nothing, over a wrapped present, over a conversation nobody had heard a word of.
That was the story they would tell. That was all they had.
Delphine Fairchild, unhinged, violent, common at last.
“Delphine?”
Heath’s voice. I looked up and found him standing in the doorway to the ballroom, his face pale with shock, his eyes moving from my bloody fist to Kendall’s broken nose and back again.
He didn’t come to me.
He went to her.
I watched him cross the room and gather Kendall in his arms, watched him pull her against his chest while she sobbed and bled onto his tuxedo, watched him look down at her with an expression of concern and tenderness that I hadn’t seen directed at me in months.
“HOW DARE YOU!”
Montana’s voice cut through my paralysis. I turned to find her advancing on me, her face contorted with rage, her hand raised to strike.
“You vicious, common little whore. How dare you come into our event and assault a guest. How dare you embarrass this family with your jealousy and your violence. I should have done this years ago.”
Her hand drew back further, and I could see the diamonds on her fingers glinting in the candlelight, and I knew she was going to hit me and I didn’t care.
I didn’t care about anything anymore. My husband was holding another woman and my secret was in a gold box at my feet and everything I had tried to build was crumbling around me.
“I think we’re done here.”
Blair’s voice, sharp and commanding. She stepped between me and Montana, her shoulder connecting solidly with the older woman’s chest, pushing her back.
“Touch her and I’ll make sure every person in Newport knows exactly what kind of woman you really are, Montana. I’ll destroy you so thoroughly that you won’t be able to show your face at a single event in this state for the rest of your miserable life.”
Montana’s mouth opened and closed, but no sound came out.
I bent down and picked up the gold box. It was the only thing in that room that was still mine.
Blair turned to me, her expression softening. “Come on, Del. We’re leaving.”
She took my arm and guided me toward the door, moving fast through the crowd of gawking guests. I could feel their eyes on me, could hear the whispers starting, could sense the scandal spreading through the room in real time.
I didn’t look back. I couldn’t. If I looked back and saw Heath still holding Kendall, still comforting her instead of coming after me, I would shatter into pieces too small to ever put back together.
We were almost to the exit when I heard it.
“Del!”
His voice, calling my name. Desperate. Confused.
I kept walking.
“Del, wait!”
Footsteps behind us. Running.