Chapter 5
Chapter Five
Three weeks later I made myself go to the Larkspur Foundation gala, a charity event I'd attended every year of my relationship and had no intention of skipping now, because disappearing would have handed Charles exactly the victory he wanted.
Let him explain my absence to a room full of people who already had their own theories. I wasn't going to make it easy.
I wore green, a sharp emerald that did nothing to soften me and everything to announce I had no plans to fade into the wallpaper of my own scandal.
I stood near the bar with a glass of champagne I had no intention of finishing and I watched the door, because some instinct told me Charles wouldn't be able to resist showing up either.
He arrived with Lucy on his arm, three months further along now, her dress cut to make sure nobody in the room missed the point.
She kept one hand on her stomach the entire night, an absent little caress that managed to look both tender and performative, a gesture aimed less at the baby than at every woman in that room who'd ever doubted whether Lucy Marsh could land a man like Charles Hamilton.
Society has a particular cruelty reserved for women in my position.
Nobody says anything outright. They just watch you, sideways, over the rims of their glasses, waiting to see if you'll crack, as if your composure is a broadway show they paid admission for and your collapse would be the better option for the night.
I felt that audience all night, dozens of pairs of eyes cataloguing every flicker of my expression for signs I was breaking.
Lucy found her way to me once, near the dessert table, with the particular bravery of a woman who'd already won and wanted to confirm it in person.
"I'm glad you came," she said, and the words might have sounded almost kind if I hadn't watched her hand drift back to her stomach the instant she said them, an absent little caress timed precisely to land while she was looking at me.
"It would have looked strange if you'd hidden away. "
"I don't hide," I said, and watched something flicker behind her eyes, not quite doubt, but something close enough to it that I filed it away with everything else.
"No," she agreed, after a beat that lasted half a second too long. "I suppose you don't."
She walked away before I could say anything else, and I stood there with my unfinished champagne, watching her rejoin Charles across the room, and felt something settle in my chest that wasn't quite anger and wasn't quite grief.
It was closer to recognition, the specific, cold clarity of finally seeing a person exactly as they are rather than as you'd spent years choosing to see them.
I didn't break. I talked business with men who'd known my father for decades, I laughed at the right moments, and I refused to look at Lucy's stomach even once, because giving her that satisfaction would have cost me more than I was willing to spend.
But underneath the green dress and the composed smile, something in me had gone very still and very cold, the particular stillness of a woman deciding she has nothing left to lose and therefore nothing left to fear.
I excused myself to the terrace sometime after eleven, telling myself I just needed air, knowing full well I needed distance from a room that had turned my heartbreak into its evening's entertainment.