Chapter 9: The Gala

The Reed Freight dinner is held every year in the glass atrium on the ground floor of the tower.

There were three hundred people in it, and a string quartet.

A banner hung over the ice sculptures that said Moving the World Since 1971.

I had not been invited this year.

I wore the navy dress I'd bought for my father-in-law's funeral.

I walked in through the front doors beside a waiter carrying crab cakes.

Nobody stopped me.

Patricia had called at noon.

"Bring me Maxwell tonight," she'd said. "I'll keep him at my house, and he can have the quiet. You go and be seen."

"Seen by whom?"

"By everyone Landon needs to believe him."

So Max was in Patricia's sunroom with his headphones and an atlas of harbors.

I was alone in a crowded hall.

I took a glass of sparkling water, and I found a pillar to stand beside.

Landon was at the center of the room in a black tuxedo, shaking hands.

He looked healthy, rested and rich, and I did not know that man.

Camille stood at his left in a cream satin gown with a diamond pendant at her throat.

I recognized it.

It was the necklace my husband had told me was at the jeweler's for repair.

A man tapped a glass with a fork, and the quartet stopped.

"Friends," Landon said, climbing the two steps to the little stage. "Thank you for coming."

He waited for quiet.

"Reed Freight has been in my family for fifty years. My father built it on one idea: you honor the people beside you."

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