Chapter 10
“Yes,” I said. “That was useful when your first clinic couldn’t make payroll.”
He glanced around. Two donors nearby had stopped pretending not to listen.
He smiled at them, then turned back to me.
“I won’t let you hurt her.”
I almost admired him then.
Not for the betrayal. Not for the lying.
For the absurd confidence it took to stand inside my hotel, beneath my lights, on the night of my unveiling, and believe he was protecting his mistress from me.
“You should go back to her,” I said. “She looks under-watered.”
His eyes narrowed.
“Stay away from us tonight.”
“Or?”
The word left me softly.
Chase’s face changed.
I had given him exactly what he wanted: a challenge he could recast as instability.
“You want witnesses?” he asked.
“No,” I said. “You do.”
He did not understand.
That was his tragedy.
He returned to Sloane and bent his head to whisper. She looked toward me, then away. Her mouth trembled.
A performance beginning its second act.
I moved through the ballroom slowly, greeting people who did not know whether to embrace me or observe me like weather damage.
“Evelyn, darling,” said Lila Van Doren, a museum trustee with the blood temperature of a marble statue. “We weren’t sure you were coming.”
“Neither was Chase.”
Her eyes glittered.
There are women in high society who survive on scandal the way sharks survive on movement. Lila was one of them.
“I do hope you’re well,” she said.
“I’m better funded than ever.”
She blinked.
I left her with that.
At the bar, I asked for sparkling water. No alcohol tonight. Not one drop. I knew Chase. By midnight, someone would say I had seemed intoxicated, emotional, erratic. So I stayed crystal clear.
At 8:16 p.m., Cecilia texted me.
All filings ready. Injunction packet signed. Reeves confirmed. Cameras active. Breathe.
I did.
At 8:23 p.m., Julian Cross arrived.
I saw him first in the reflection of the bar mirror.
Tall. Black tuxedo. Dark hair combed back. A face too sharp to be comforting and too calm to be harmless.
Julian was a healthcare compliance attorney turned private equity strategist, which meant he knew where bodies were buried because he had once written the rules for graveyards. He had been my friend before Chase. Then my almost. Then nothing, because I married the man with the better smile and the louder dream.