Chapter 18
SIENNA
The stage lights are brighter than they looked from the floor. Past the glare I can make out the first ring of tables, then shapes, then the dark.
I tell them about my grandfather. The story he told at every one of these dinners, the one where the joke lands on him, and I put the pause exactly where he always put it, and the room laughs the way it used to laugh for him.
Then the rest of it. He built Ellerin one person at a time, and he believed it was never finished.
The best way to honor him isn’t remembering him. It’s building.
Then I tell them what I told Marsh on Monday. The seat has been empty since he died. Starting next week, it isn’t.
The sound the room makes is not applause yet. It’s hundreds of people turning to look at each other.
Cade is at one of the front tables near the center, with a clear view of the stage but a tight cluster of tables between him and the steps. He looks unfairly good, and he looks tired, thinner than when I left him, the angles of his face sharper, and I hate that I notice both things.
I say thank you. I mean it in every direction at once.
The applause starts before I finish the word. I step back from the lectern and turn for the steps, and what I feel, turning, is proud. I did this. Nobody had to save me.
I hear my name.
Not from the crowd. Behind me.
“You fat bitch.”
I turn. Ashley is coming out of the dark at the side of the stage, fast, into the light. I barely have time to understand what I’m seeing before her hand connects with my face.
The slap turns my head. My teeth catch the inside of my lip and pain flashes through my cheek. Somewhere below me the applause breaks apart, and somebody gasps, high and sharp.
I taste blood. My eyes sting and I refuse to let them water.
Every part of me wants to hit her back, and I don’t move my feet.
If I do, this becomes two women fighting over a man, and that’s the only version of tonight she can win.
I look at her. “You know what? I like who I am, Ashley. Can you say the same?”
Her hand comes up again.
It never reaches me.
Cade catches her wrist.
I never saw him cross the floor or take the steps. Ashley twists against his grip and doesn’t even look at him. She’s still looking at me.
“You think you can stand there and tell me what Cade feels?” Her voice carries to every wall. She wants it to. “You think because he showed up at your pathetic little house?—”
“Ashley.”
I barely recognize his voice. I’ve heard Cade angry before. I have never heard him sound like this.
Ashley’s mouth is still open. Nothing else comes out of it.
Security comes through the tables fast, and Cade turns her toward them without letting go of her wrist, and his voice rises so the room can hear it the way she wanted the room to hear hers.
“If you ever touch my wife again?—”
The security men take her. She’s saying things, my name, his name, farther and farther away, and out in the dark past the lights the phones are up and glowing, held high and steady. Filming.
I lower my hand from my mouth. There’s blood on my fingertip.
My knees loosen. I lock them before anyone can see. Ashley collapses in front of rooms, beautifully, every time, and I would rather die than let this room watch me do it.
Cade is already there.
His hands close around my upper arms before my knees can betray me, and his weight shifts, and I know what’s coming because I’ve watched him do this before.
“Don’t you dare.”
He stops. He steadies me without pulling me against him, then shrugs out of his jacket and settles it around my shoulders, warm from him, and bends until his eyes are level with mine. Pale green, gone almost clear under the stage lights, and fixed on nothing in this room but me.
“Look at me.”
I do. It helps. I hate that it helps, but it does.
The next part happens in pieces. A police officer with a notepad, kind, asking short questions, and I answer them with the taste of copper still in my mouth.
“Did she strike you?”
“Yes.”
“Did she attempt to strike you again?”
“Yes.” I look at Cade. He’s a foot away and hasn’t moved. “My husband stopped her.”
The officer’s pen pauses on that, then goes on.
“Do you want to pursue charges, ma’am?”
Cade doesn’t answer for me. He waits.
“Yes,” I say. “I do.”
Pierce appears at Cade’s shoulder, gray-faced.
“Call the attorneys,” Cade says.
“Already done.”
“I want every video preserved. Every witness identified before they leave.”
Pierce goes.
Marsh reaches us with his bow tie undone and my notecards pressed to his chest. “My car is outside, sweetheart. Driver’s waiting. I’ll have him take you straight home.”
“Thank you, Marsh,” Cade says. Then, to me: “I’m taking you home.”
It isn’t a question. I find I don’t want it to be one.
In the car, Cade doesn’t turn on the radio.
His jacket is still around my shoulders and every few minutes he looks over at me before putting his eyes back on the road.
The anger hasn’t left him. I can see it in the hard line of his mouth and the tension across his shoulders under the white shirt, but he hasn’t said Ashley’s name since we pulled away from the hotel, and I don’t want to say it either.
The adrenaline is wearing off, leaving me cold in places the heater doesn’t reach. A shiver goes through me hard enough that he notices.
“You’re cold.”
“I’m fine.”
His hand is already on the temperature control. Warm air blows harder across my legs, and I pull his jacket closed over my chest and tuck my fingers into the sleeves.
“It was so cold that night.”
His hand stops on the dial.
I hadn’t meant to say it. Maybe that’s why I don’t take it back. He doesn’t ask which night. For a while he just drives, and then, quietly, “How did you get home?”
I turn my head.
“After the gala.” He keeps his eyes on the road. “Lauren asked me, and I couldn’t tell her. How did you get home, Sienna?”
“A cab.”
He says it back to me like a word he doesn’t know. “A cab.”
“Yes.”
“How long were you outside?”
“I don’t know. A while.”
“Sienna.”
“I really don’t. Long enough to get cold.” His eyes drop to the jacket wrapped around me and I hear myself add, “It wasn’t that bad.”
“Don’t make it smaller for me.”
There’s no anger in it. No demand that I make him feel better, either. He just looks sick.
So for once, I don’t make it smaller.
“One of Granddad’s friends came outside while I was waiting.
He’d known him since the office over the hardware store.
He used to come to the house when I was little.
I think I was eight the first time I met him.
He gave me twenty dollars at my college graduation and told me not to tell his wife because she’d only given me ten. ”
I can see it again without trying. The white light over the hotel entrance. My breath in front of my face. Brass and walnut pressed against my ribs because there was nowhere to put it.
“He walked out with his coat over his arm and saw me standing there with the plaque. He looked at me, and then he looked at the curb, and his whole face changed.”
“Sienna.”
“He knew.”
It comes out softer than I expect, and I keep going anyway, because he asked.
“He’d been sitting in that ballroom. He watched you carry her out. Everybody watched you carry her out. So he saw me standing there by myself with Granddad’s plaque, and he knew exactly why there wasn’t a car for me.”
“Fuck.” It comes out under his breath.
“He offered me a ride. He kept saying it wasn’t any trouble, and he was trying so hard not to embarrass me that it made it worse.”
“Why didn’t you go with him?”
“Because I couldn’t. For an hour, Cade? Sitting beside a man who’d known me since I was a child while both of us pretended he hadn’t just watched my husband carry another woman out of my grandfather’s tribute and drive away with her?
I couldn’t do it. So I told him I already had a car coming.
I thanked him for coming for Granddad. I told him Granddad would have been pleased to see him. ”
My thumb moves over the cuff of his jacket.
“I was freezing and humiliated, and somehow I was still worried about making sure he didn’t feel uncomfortable about what had happened to me.”
Cade looks stricken before he turns back to the road. Seeing it hurts more than I expect.
“I made him leave. He looked back at me from the steps. Then I waited.”
“With the plaque?”
“Yes.”
“Standing outside dressed for a ballroom.”
I nod.
“The cab driver thought I’d won the plaque. He saw it on the seat beside me and congratulated me. I thanked him.”
Cade turns his head.
“What was I supposed to say? No, actually, it belongs to my dead grandfather and my husband left with another woman before they gave it to me?”
He doesn’t have an answer for that. I look down at his jacket around me.
“Your text came halfway home.”
He knows the words. I can see that before I say them.
“At Ashley’s. Don’t wait up.”
His jaw works. “I told myself I was being considerate. Letting you know where I was so you wouldn’t worry.
” He has to stop and start again. “I took our car and didn’t ask how you were getting home.
I didn’t ask if you were all right. It didn’t even occur to me that you might be standing outside in the cold. ”
I don’t tell him it was fine. It wasn’t.
The highway curves closer to the water, and for a while neither of us speaks.
“They all watched you,” I say eventually.
“I can still see them doing it. I’d gotten halfway through the speech.
They were listening. I was talking about Granddad, and for a few minutes I had them.
” My throat tightens. “Then she made that little sound and you caught her. You picked her up, and the whole room went with you. People put their glasses down. Someone opened the doors for you. Everybody moved so you could carry her through, and I was still standing there talking. I finished the speech while hundreds of people wondered where my husband was taking another woman.”
He has gone pale. “I knew I left you up there,” he says, low. “I didn’t understand what that meant.”