Chapter 5 The Dinner Party
Summer
It has been three weeks since I found Colt with Cheyenne at The Butcher Block. What I learned in the dark that night about who lives in his sleep hasn't faded. I have carried it alone with nowhere to put it.
But tonight isn't about that. Tonight is a Bennet family dinner, which has its own special category of torture.
Sonny and Vivienne host these quarterly.
Eight to ten people. Charleston's inner circle.
White tablecloth, heavy silver, the kind of multi-course meal that exists less for the food and more for the theater of eating it in the right order with the right fork.
I used to dread these dinners for the usual reasons. Vivienne's comments. Sonny's condescension. The slow-motion performance of being judged by people who decided I was insufficient the day Colt brought me home.
Tonight I dread it for a new reason.
Cheyenne is invited.
Colt told me yesterday. "Oh, Dad's including Cheyenne in the dinner Thursday. She's been killing it on Tidewater and he wants her to network with Calloway and the Charleston crowd."
My stomach dropped. I said, "Great." Because what else do you say. She's a colleague. She's important to the deal. The dinner is work-adjacent. Everything about this is reasonable if you don't look too hard.
I look too hard. It's what I do.
***
The Bennet estate is gorgeous and I have hated it since the first time I walked through the door.
The house itself is stunning. Antebellum, two stories, white columns, the kind of historic Lowcountry architecture that shows up on postcards and home tours.
What unsettles me is the energy of the place, the inherited expectation pressing in from every room.
The portraits on the walls, the silver on the table, the unspoken rule that everything in this house, including the people, must be polished and positioned and appropriate at all times.
I'm wearing black. Not red. I don't have the energy for red. Black is armor without being a statement.
Colt and I arrive together, and he looks so good it actually hurts a little. The dark jacket, the stubble he didn't bother shaving, his hand finding the small of my back on the steps. Eight years, and he can still make me feel like I did at the start, off balance and a little stupid over him.
I don't want to be here. Vivienne's dinners are two slow hours of cream silk and cool smiles and being looked at like something that wandered in off the street.
But he asked me to come, and his hand is warm against my back, and I love him too much to send him in alone.
So I let him walk me up to his mother's door, telling myself I can get through anything as long as he's next to me. I usually can.
Vivienne greets us at the door. Cream dress. Pearl earrings. A smile like a closed gate.
"Colt, darling. You look wonderful." She air-kisses his cheek. Turns to me. "Summer. How nice." The pause before nice contains a full paragraph of unwritten commentary. "Black. Very sleek."
"Thank you, Vivienne."
We enter the dining room. Sonny is near the sideboard, scotch in hand, flanked by Calloway and a couple I don't recognize. There are place cards on the table. Eight seats. White linen. More silverware than any single meal should require.
I find my card. I'm at the far end of the table. Between Calloway's wife, whose name I can never remember, and the man I don't know.
Colt's card is in the center. Next to Sonny on one side.
And Cheyenne on the other.
I read the cards twice. Colt Bennet, center left. Cheyenne Aldrich, center right. Summer King-Bennet, far end.
My husband in the middle. His work partner beside him. His wife in exile.
Vivienne did the seating, and she put me as far from Colt as an eight-person table allows.
I should say something. Switch the cards.
Laugh it off. Vivienne, I think there's been a mix-up.
But I don't. I look at the arrangement and I understand what it is.
You don't belong at the center of this table.
You don't belong at the center of his life.
Here is your seat. Here is where we've put you. Be grateful you were invited at all.
I sit down.
***
Cheyenne arrives ten minutes after us, and she looks like she was built for this room.
Navy dress. Simple. Expensive. The kind of tasteful elegance Vivienne approves of.
Her hair is down, falling in waves in a way that costs money and takes three hours.
She walks into the Bennet dining room with the easy confidence of a woman who has been here before.
Not physically. Energetically. She fits. She speaks this language.
I don't.
"Summer!" She comes to me first. Smart. It's always smart to greet the wife. It preempts suspicion, establishes goodwill, makes you look gracious. "You look amazing. I love the black."
"Thank you. You look great too."
She hugs me. Brief. Perfumed. The kind of hug that people who aren't friends give each other to perform friendship. I hug her back because I am a civilized person and because stabbing someone with a salad fork at a dinner party is generally frowned upon.
She takes her seat. Next to Colt. He turns to her and the careful version of him he wears at that firm all day is just gone.
The work face drops. He's looser, easier.
The smile that crinkles his eyes, the one I haven't seen aimed at me in months, lights right up for her. He has no idea he's doing it.
"Hey, you made it." His voice is warmer than it was when I got out of the car ten minutes ago.
"Wouldn't miss it." She smiles at him and their eye contact holds a second too long.
Dinner begins.
I talk to Calloway's wife. Her name is Carol.
She collects miniature teapots and has opinions about hydrangeas.
I am polite and attentive and I laugh at the right moments and I ask follow-up questions and I perform the role of the engaging dinner guest while my husband, eight feet away, is leaning toward Cheyenne and laughing at something she said about the Charlotte trip.
I can hear them. Not every word. Fragments. Remember when Calloway... and Cheyenne's laugh. That waiter was completely... and Colt's. They have inside jokes now. Stories that belong to them.
I cut my steak. I eat. I nod at Carol's teapot opinions.
Sonny is watching them too. From the head of the table.
Scotch in hand. He's adjusting the silver salt and pepper shakers as he watches, sliding them a quarter inch left, then a quarter inch right.
He's not just observing. He's pleased. The pleasure is small and specific and it lives in how he sets the salt down exactly where it was. Everything in its place.
I take a drink of wine, and then I see Cheyenne put her hand on Colt's forearm and squeeze. He covers her hand with his for a half-second, and nobody at the table reacts because nobody is watching, and the casualness of it tells me this isn't new. This is habitual.
I set my fork down.
"Excuse me," I say to Carol. "I need to use the restroom."
I walk out of the dining room. Down the hallway. Past the powder room. I keep walking until I reach the back door and I step onto the patio and the Charleston night wraps around me like a blanket I didn't ask for.
I press my back against the wall and I close my eyes.
I am not crazy.
I am not jealous.
I am not insecure.
I am a woman sitting at the wrong end of her own table watching her husband hold another woman's hand. And I am running out of ways to explain it away.
***
Colt finds me fifteen minutes later. I'm still on the patio, looking at the water.
"Hey. You okay? You disappeared."
"Needed some air."
He stands next to me. Puts his arm around my shoulders. I stiffen, then make myself relax, because stiffening will lead to questions and questions will lead to a conversation I'm not having in the middle of Vivienne's dinner party.
"You cold?"
"I'm fine."
"You wanna head out? We can make excuses."
I look at him. He seems concerned. Not guilty. Concerned. Because in his mind, nothing happened in that dining room. He sat next to a colleague. They talked about work. He's a good husband who noticed his wife stepped away.
"I'm fine," I say again. "Let's go back in."
We go back in. I sit at the far end. He sits at the center. Cheyenne is telling a story about a client in Atlanta and the whole table is laughing and Colt is looking at her like she is the reason the room is good.
I eat dessert. I make conversation. I smile.
This is how it happens. Not with a bang. With a dinner party. With a seating chart. With a hand on a forearm and a wife at the wrong end of the table, eating crème br?lée and pretending she doesn't see the fire.