Chapter 5 Darcy
The ballroom at the hotel glowed the way I'd hoped it would when I first walked the space eight months earlier, garden roses banked along the head table exactly as I'd fought for, candlelight catching the gold thread in the linens, the band's first set drifting warm and unhurried under two hundred conversations.
For the first hour, watching it all move the way I'd built it to move, I let myself feel something close to pride.
Whatever else was true about my place in this family, I knew how to make a room like this work, and I could stand at the edge of it and see my own hand in every part that was going right.
The first problem arrived at seven fifteen, when the sommelier pulled me aside to say the reserve Bordeaux Edmund had specifically requested for the toast had been mistakenly poured into carafes meant for the second course, and half of it was already gone.
I spent twelve minutes solving it, rerouting a case from the cellar, apologizing to a confused waitstaff supervisor, checking that the timing wouldn't slip the toasts past the dinner service.
It was exactly the sort of fire I was good at putting out, quick and contained, invisible to anyone not looking for it.
By the time I made it back to the ballroom floor, the photographer had already herded the family into position near the fireplace for the formal portrait, and the shot was assembling without me.
I could see Tyler in the center, Edmund and Claudette flanking him, Joanna beside her mother, and Felicity settled in beside Edmund with the easy posture of someone who belonged exactly where she was standing.
I crossed the room quickly, my heels loud enough on the marble that I heard them myself, and reached the group just as the photographer called out that he had it, that was the shot, and the cluster of family began to break apart around me before I'd even found a place inside it.
"Did you get one with Darcy?" Tyler asked, glancing back, already half turned toward a cluster of his father's business associates.
"We can do another round later if there's time," the photographer said, checking his watch, and there wasn't time, not really, not with dinner about to be called, and everyone around us had already begun drifting toward their tables.
Tyler squeezed my hand once, said something about finding me during dinner, and was pulled into a conversation with Douglas and one of the Ashworth cousins before I could answer.
I told myself it didn't matter. One photograph.
I'd handled harder things than a missed portrait, and there would be other pictures from the night, candid ones, better ones probably, ones that didn't require me to stand exactly where the photographer's assistant had chalked a mark on the floor.
I found my seat at the head table, between Tyler's empty chair and Douglas's wife, and made conversation through the salad course, and told myself the evening was still going beautifully, because in every way that mattered to two hundred other people, it was.
Douglas's wife leaned in partway through the course, lowering her voice under the noise of the room.
"You built all of this, you know. I hope somebody's told you that tonight, because I don't think anyone will.
" I thanked her, meant it, and let the compliment sit warm in my chest for exactly as long as it took Tyler to finally slide into the seat beside me, flushed from the receiving line, kissing my temple in passing and immediately turning to answer something Edmund's business partner had asked him from two seats down.
I ate my salad and watched him field the question smoothly, easily, the same competence he brought to everything, and told myself there would be time later, once the toasts were finished, once the obligations of the night had thinned out, for the two of us to actually find each other inside it.
I checked the run of show one more time under the table, the small habitual reassurance of a plan still holding, and reminded myself that whatever had happened with the photograph, the night itself was still mine in the ways that mattered, still built exactly the way I'd designed it, still working.
The toasts began after the entrées were cleared.
Edmund spoke first, gracious and brief, thanking the room for coming and thanking Claudette for forty-two years of marriage in a way that drew a warm ripple of laughter and applause.
Joanna spoke next, a little too long, a story about their father teaching her to drive that ran past its natural ending point but drew a genuine laugh at the finish.
Then Claudette rose, champagne glass in hand, and the room settled into the attentive hush that gathered whenever she wanted to be listened to.
She spoke about Edmund first, their courtship, the early years of the company, a few practiced lines that had clearly been polished in front of a mirror.
Then she turned, and her gaze found Felicity's table, and something in her voice warmed in a way I recognized because I had spent twelve years being on the wrong side of it.
"And I have to say," Claudette said, raising her glass slightly toward Felicity, "watching this family grow over the years, I've been so fortunate to have women in it who understand what it means to belong to something bigger than themselves.
Felicity, darling, you have been exactly that for us since you were twenty years old.
Devoted, gracious, always thinking of everyone else first. Honestly, some nights I look at you and think you're the daughter I should have had. "
The room laughed. It wasn't a cruel laugh, not exactly, more the easy, indulgent laugh of people who'd had good wine and assumed the comment was harmless, a compliment offered a little too warmly, nothing more.
Felicity pressed a hand to her chest in practiced modesty and mouthed something back at Claudette.
Someone at my table said, "Oh, that's sweet," to no one in particular.
I sat very still and looked for Tyler. He was beside me, close enough that I could see his face clearly in the candlelight, and for one full second I watched him understand exactly what his mother had just said and exactly where I was sitting when she said it.
His jaw tightened. His eyes moved to me and then away, toward his mother, toward the room, toward anywhere that wasn't the particular expression I knew was on my own face.
He didn't say anything. He didn't stand, didn't correct her, didn't make some easy joke to redirect the room the way I'd watched him redirect a dozen tense business dinners over the years.
He picked up his glass and took a sip of wine, and the moment passed, absorbed into the general warmth of the toast, and Claudette moved on to thank the event's donors by name, and within ninety seconds the whole thing had folded itself back into the ordinary rhythm of the evening without anyone returning to the remark.
I clapped at the end of the toasts and answered Douglas's wife when she asked about the flowers.
Tyler put his glass down beside mine. He was close enough to touch, and I had never felt further from him.
I kept waiting for him to turn toward me and acknowledge what had happened.
When the band began again, he rose to greet someone by the bar.
When the band started up again and people began rising from their tables, I found Tyler near the bar, accepting congratulations from a state senator's aide, and I touched his arm and asked, quietly, if I could speak to him for a minute.
He excused himself and followed me out to the corridor outside the ballroom, where the noise dropped to a muffled hum behind the closed doors and it was just the two of us under the hotel's dim sconce lighting.
"I waited for you to say something," I said. My voice came out more level than I expected, given how much was moving underneath it. "In there. When your mother said that about Felicity. I looked right at you."
"Darcy, come on." He glanced back toward the ballroom door, already impatient to return to it. "It's a party. She's had two glasses of champagne and she's being sentimental about an old family friend. It's not that deep."
"She called her the daughter she should have had. In a room full of two hundred people. At your father's birthday."
"You're reading way too much into one sentence." He rubbed a hand over his face, the gesture of a man who had somewhere better to be. "Look, you know how my mother is. Don't make tonight about you. It's Dad's night. Can we just get through it?"
I stood there for a moment and let the sentence finish settling into me, all the way down.
It wasn't a new sentence. It was the same sentence he'd been handing me for years, dressed in different words each time, asking me to be smaller so the room could stay comfortable.
I thought, absurdly, of the fishing photograph still sitting in a folder in his parents' front hall, of the florist argument, of a hundred small evenings where I'd swallowed something for the sake of keeping the peace and told myself it counted as love.
I'd absorbed it before. I'd absorbed twelve years of it, told myself each time that the next occasion would be different, that his private tenderness was worth the public cost. I understood, standing in that corridor in my good dress with my carefully applied makeup and my folder of vendor contacts still tucked in my clutch, that I had finally run out of room to absorb anything else.
"Okay," I said.
Something in my voice must have registered, because he looked at me properly for the first time since we'd stepped into the hallway. "Okay, what?"
"Go back inside. Enjoy your father's party.
" I was already turning toward the coat check, already running through the list of things that needed handing off before I could leave: the band's set list for the last hour, the valet count, the venue manager who'd need to know I wouldn't be doing the final walkthrough.
My mind had gone strange and clear, the way it did during a crisis at an event, when there was no time left for feeling and only time for the next necessary action.
I found the venue manager near the kitchen doors and gave her calm, complete instructions for closing out the night, thanked her for everything, and told her I had a family matter to attend to.
She didn't ask questions. I collected my coat and my purse, and I walked out through the side entrance instead of the main lobby, past the valet stand where I'd personally briefed every attendant that afternoon.
Outside, the July air was warm after the ballroom's air-conditioning, and I stood on the sidewalk for a moment with my clutch pressed against my chest, waiting for the tears to arrive the way I assumed they would.
They didn't come. What came instead was a strange, quiet clarity, the same one I remembered from the flooded tent at the Hendricks wedding years ago, the one that always showed up right when everything else was falling apart and told me exactly what needed to happen next.
I flagged a cab instead of calling for the car service Tyler's family used, because I didn't want a driver who might mention to anyone at the Westcott house that Mrs. Westcott had left the gala alone.
In the back seat, my phone lit up twice, a text from Douglas's wife asking if I was all right, and a text from Joanna, three words long, asking where I'd gone.
I didn't answer either one. I watched Richmond slide past the window, the lit storefronts along Cary Street, the bridge lights reflected long and broken on the river, and I thought about the folder of family photographs still sitting somewhere in the Westcott front hall, Edmund laughing on that boat dock, and how certain I'd been, ten days ago, that finding the right photograph could fix something that had never been about photographs at all.
I had left without waiting for someone to come after me.