18. Jillian #2
“Of course not.” Her voice stayed steady, but I’d learned to read the small tells. The tightening at the corner of her mouth. The way her hand found the stem of her glass and held it too carefully. “I’m as appalled as anyone.”
“Naturally,” Beverly said, in a tone that granted her nothing.
It wasn’t ruin. Margot was too old and too clever for ruin.
But for the first time, I watched her work to keep her place in a room instead of simply owning it.
For the first time, the circle looked at her and wondered, and she knew they were wondering.
That was the part she couldn’t manage. She couldn’t seat it or crop it or rearrange her way out of it.
She would spend the next year earning back what Chloe had cost her, learning at last how it felt to stand outside a door and wait to be let in.
I knew that feeling well.
The speeches began.
Foundation board members thanked donors. Donors thanked the community. The choreography of mutual appreciation that funded children’s hospitals and literacy programs and all the genuine good that came from these glittering evenings of performance and position.
I was standing near the east pillar when Trevor stepped to the microphone, and the room’s ambient murmur shifted into surprised attention.
This wasn’t on the program.
“I’ll keep this brief,” he said, and his voice carried the particular quality of a man who’d made a decision and wasn’t going to back down from it.
“This gala means a great deal to my family. To the Foundation. To the work we’ve tried to do for three generations.
But last year, I used it to do something unforgivable. ”
The silence in the room became absolute.
“Last year at this gala, I made the worst mistake of my life.” His eyes found mine across the crowd. “I danced with the wrong woman to a song that belonged to my wife.”
Someone gasped. I couldn’t tell who. I couldn’t look away from Trevor’s face.
“I can’t undo what I did. I can’t give Jillian back the moment I ruined, or the year of pain that followed. But I can spend every day earning back the right to dance with her.”
He stepped away from the podium. The crowd parted for him like water, faces turning to follow his path across the ballroom until he stopped in front of me and held out his hand.
“Jillian. Please.”
The room watched. Harper, tears streaming down her face near the bar.
Beverly Ashworth, nodding once with grim satisfaction.
Patricia Worthington with her mouth actually hanging open.
Margot Anderson, standing near the garden doors with her shoulders squared and her chin high, having chosen her side weeks ago on that terrace.
And Chloe, frozen at the edge of the crowd, watching everything she’d schemed for slip away.
I took his hand.
The opening notes of ‘The Very Thought of You’ drifted from the string quartet, and Trevor pulled me onto the empty dance floor. His arm came around my waist. His forehead touched mine.
“I’m sorry,” he whispered. “I’m so sorry. I should have…”
“I know.”
“I love you. I never stopped. Not for a second.”
“I know that too.”
We turned slowly in the center of the room, and for the first time in a year, I let myself feel the shape of his arms around me, the familiar rhythm of his heartbeat, the way we’d always fit together despite every obstacle the world had thrown in our path.
“You’re crying,” he murmured.
“Yes.”
“Good tears or…”
“Don’t push your luck, Anderson.”
His laugh was watery. “Wouldn’t dream of it.”
We danced. The room blurred at the edges of my vision. And when the song reached its bridge, the part that had played while I’d stood alone last year watching my marriage die, I pressed my face into his shoulder and let the tears finally, finally fall.
I didn’t see Margot approach Chloe. But her voice cut through the whispered commentary of the crowd, cool, precise, final.
“I believe your time in these rooms has concluded permanently, Miss Williams. The car has been arranged. Security will escort you.”
“Mrs. Anderson, please…”
“Every drawing room that matters received a very interesting package this afternoon. Consider yourself finished.” A pause. “I’d suggest London, but I imagine word travels quickly among people who value integrity.”
The uniformed men I’d arranged materialized at Chloe’s elbows. She had the presence of mind not to make a scene, self-preservation instinct, probably, but as they guided her toward the exit, she looked back.
Looked directly at us.
At me, wrapped in gold and in Trevor’s arms, dancing to our song in the same room where she’d tried to take everything from me.
The doors closed behind her.
Trevor dipped me backward, his hand secure on my spine, and kissed me in front of everyone. The applause started somewhere, Harper, probably, and spread through the room like summer rain.
When he pulled me upright, I was laughing.
“Show-off.”
“Absolutely.” He tucked a strand of hair behind my ear. “I have a year of groveling to make up for. Might as well start dramatic.”
We finished the dance. We accepted congratulations that ranged from genuine to transparently envious.
We watched Chloe’s red dress disappear through the glass doors into the parking lot, watched her turn back one last time to see us together under the chandeliers, and then watched her finally, permanently leave.
Later, much later, we found our way to the balcony off the ballroom. The city glittered below us, and the music drifted through the glass doors, and for the first time in a year, I felt like I could breathe without pain.
“The papers are still in my desk drawer,” Trevor said quietly. “Unsigned.”
“I know.”
“I want to burn them.”
“I know that too.”
He turned to face me, taking both my hands in his. “Come home. Please.”
The night air was cool against my bare shoulders. Inside, the gala continued, our gala, the event I’d coordinated, with my name on the program and my triumph written across every face that had once pitied me.
I smiled at my husband.
“Ask me again after the last dance.”