Chapter 3
Vanessa straightened up and tapped one manicured nail against the edge of the blanket, a gesture so small and so deliberate that it required a certain kind of coldness to have calculated it. "I was supposed to marry a powerful man," she said. Her voice had gone sweet now, the sweetness she used when she wanted witnesses to remember her as the one who had been suffering, the fiancée who had stood faithfully beside a man who was no longer the man she had agreed to marry. "Not a burden everyone has to push around."
"We are still engaged," I said quietly.
My calmness irritated her. I had noticed this over eleven weeks of careful observation: Vanessa's cruelty was most elaborate when it encountered a response that refused to give her what she was aiming for, which was the visible evidence of damage. She laughed, a short sound, and turned slightly toward the watching crowd with the instinct of a performer acknowledging an audience. "For now," she said. "Until your board realizes you can't even walk into a meeting."
That sentence.
Not I love you. Not I'm frightened. Not I'm sorry. Not even some version of I don't know how to do this, which would have been honest and would have been, if not forgivable, at least human. She had looked at a man she had agreed to spend her life with and she had calculated, out loud, in front of his family and his father's guests and the string quartet that had gone quiet in the last thirty seconds, how quickly his empire would become available once his legs were no longer useful.
She stepped back as she finished speaking, and the movement caught the edge of the blanket, which slid off one side of the chair and dropped partially to the floor. I reached for it with the slow, slightly uncoordinated motion I had been performing for eleven weeks, and before I could retrieve it, someone knelt beside me.
May you like
Clara Raines had worked in my father's household for three years. She was twenty-six, quiet in the way of people who have decided that competence is more useful than visibility, and she had been in the periphery of every terrible thing that had happened in this house for the last eleven weeks, bringing water and medication and managing the small requirements of my recovery with the focused, unhurried attention of someone who understood that the details were the thing. I had noticed her in the way you notice someone who consistently does the right thing without requiring anyone to watch them do it.
She gathered the blanket from the floor and tucked it back across my knees with both hands, and her hands were steady in the way of someone who is managing a tremor they will not allow to become visible. She did not look at the chandeliers or the diamonds or the two hundred people who were all, in this moment, watching her kneel on the marble floor of the Ashford ballroom to cover a man's legs.
