Chapter Two
THE LITTLE BOY WHO'D needed his lemonade so very urgently took exactly one sip of it, set the glass on a windowsill, and wandered off to admire the chocolate fountain.
Aislinn decided to find that funny, because the alternative was to mind, and she'd used up her entire afternoon's quota of minding back at the cloakroom. (Gordon had been very understanding.)
She turned toward the gift table, already composing the face she wore for Louis, the one that said everything was fine and this was all a grand adventure.
Except Louis wasn't at the gift table. The chess set sat abandoned between the couture towers, and its small guard was nowhere in sight, and that was strange, because her son didn't abandon posts.
Stranger still was the ballroom itself. Half the party had simply evaporated.
The string quartet was still sawing away for an audience of empty chairs, with the doomed dignity of a band on a sinking ship, waiters drifted with trays nobody wanted, and over by the mezzanine doors, the mothers had gathered into one tight, glittering knot that hummed like a wasp nest somebody had shaken.
Aislinn's feet were carrying her there before she'd finished deciding to go.
"Excuse me." She kept her voice easy and her smile on. "I'm so sorry to interrupt, but has anyone seen my son? Navy blazer, about this tall, probably standing very straight?"
The knot of women turned as one, and every face wore the same expression, the bright-eyed, wet-lipped delight of cats who'd found the cream cabinet left unlocked.
"Oh, we've seen him," said the one in emerald silk, silkily.
"The whole hotel has seen him, darling," purred another.
"What kind of mother," mused a third, to no one in particular, "doesn't even know where her own child is?"
The kind who was carrying your furs, Aislinn didn't say, because saying it would change nothing and Louis still had to sit in a classroom with their sons on Monday. "Please. Is he alright?"
"Alright?" The knot parted then, and Amybeth came through it wearing a fresh dark splash across her skirt and the expression of a woman who intended to make somebody pay for it.
"Oh, he's far better than alright, Ms. Tyndale.
He's been busy. Your son just threw himself at Valerio Le Sabre in front of half the city and called him Papa. "
The ballroom went very far away.
There was still music, presumably, and there were still voices, but all of it had thinned into a distant ringing, because that name did not belong here.
That name belonged to another life, a life she'd sealed shut and buried eight years deep, and hearing it now, in this room, in that woman's mouth, attached to her son...
"Oh," breathed Emerald Silk, watching her. "Oh, look at her face. Look at her face! It's true."
And the knot fell on the word like starving things.
"I always said there was something off about her. You appear out of nowhere in our little town, no husband, no family, no history—"
"No past at all. Like she hatched."
Aislinn was momentarily, unhelpfully impressed. Six years in that town, and the most interesting origin story she'd ever managed for herself was the rent was cheap. Hatched was better. Under wildly different circumstances she might've asked to borrow it.
"The school forms, remember? I heard it from the office myself. Father: blank."
"Does the boy even know who his father is?" Emerald Silk leaned in, sweet as syrup of ipecac. "Do you, darling? Or were there simply...too many candidates to narrow it down?"
Laughter, the tinkling kind, the kind designed to be denied later.
And Aislinn stood in the middle of it with her spine straight and her hands folded and let it break over her, because she'd learned a long time ago that this particular weather couldn't be argued with, only outlasted.
They could say whatever they liked about her. Words about her were only words.
"My son is seven years old," she said, in the pleasant tone she otherwise reserved for announcing fun surprises like the electricity bill, once the tinkling had died down.
"Whatever you'd like to think of me, you're welcome to it.
But he's seven, and he's somewhere in this hotel, and I'd like to go find him now. "
She turned.
Amybeth's hand closed around her arm.
"You are not going anywhere." The society polish was cracking now, and what showed underneath was ugly and scared.
"Everyone who matters in this city is under this roof, watching my son's birthday turn into a circus.
The Le Sabre people will want to know who staged that vulgar little stunt, and it will not be laid at my event, do you understand?
You will stay, and you will smile, and you will tell everyone that your boy invented the whole—"
"He didn't."
The word was out of Aislinn before she could weigh it, which never happened, she weighed everything, she'd spent eight years weighing every word before it left her, but there were exactly two things in this world she couldn't do, and the first was to stand in a ballroom full of vultures and call her son a liar.
Louis had never lied in his life.
And the second thing, the thing beneath the first, the thing she couldn't look at directly even now...
"Well," Amybeth said, low and vicious. "Well. So the little scholarship saint admits it. Then you can explain to Mr. Le Sabre's lawyers why your son—"
"Leave my mama alone!"
He burst back into the ballroom at a dead run, navy blazer flying open, and planted himself between Aislinn and all of them with his arms flung wide, seven years old, shaking with fury, utterly unafraid, and Aislinn's heart split clean down the middle at the sight of him.
"Louis." She reached for his shoulder. "Sweetheart—"
"No, Mama." He didn't take his eyes off the women. "She didn't do anything. She never does anything. You've been horrible to her all day and she just kept smiling at you, because that's how she is, and I'm not letting you be horrible anymore. So leave her alone."
For one whole second, nobody in the knot seemed to remember how breathing worked. A seven-year-old in a thrift-store blazer had just told the most dangerous women in three zip codes to behave themselves, and he'd done it in the tone of someone entirely prepared to enforce it.
Then Amybeth's face went a deep, mottled red.
"Why, you insolent little..." Her hand rose, palm open, rings glittering. "Someone ought to teach you some manners—"
Aislinn moved.
She didn't think, didn't weigh, didn't smile. She was simply there, wrapped around her son with her back to the blow, Louis's heartbeat hammering against her ribs, her body between his body and the world the way it had been every single day for seven years, and she shut her eyes and waited for it.
The blow never came.
When she opened her eyes and looked back over her shoulder, Amybeth's hand was still in the air, and it was going nowhere, because a man's fingers had closed around her wrist and stopped it mid-swing the way a wall stops weather.
"Basta." The word came out low, foreign, and final, half a heartbeat before the English did. "I wouldn't do that if I were you."
The voice was quiet. Pleasant, even, in the manner of a blade being drawn slowly enough to be polite about it. Around them the whole knot of women had gone white and silent and still as an unplugged carousel.
But Aislinn heard none of it and saw none of them, because every drop of blood in her body had turned to ice at the sound of that voice.
Eight years. Eight years, and she would've known it anywhere, in the dark, in a crowd, in another life entirely.
It belonged to Louis's father.