Chapter 8: The Anniversary Dinner

Five weeks later, I walked into the Brannigan Group's fortieth anniversary dinner in a green dress I had paid for myself.

I had found it at a consignment shop in Lawrenceville.

It cost sixty dollars, and it fit.

Anthony held the ballroom door.

"You don't have to do this," he said.

"They invited the lender. The lender can bring a guest."

"That isn't what I meant."

"I know what you meant." I took his arm. "I'm going in."

I had paid him rent every night for those five weeks.

He had put each envelope in a kitchen drawer without opening it.

He had also kept his promise and not kissed me again.

He slept down the hall with his door shut, and I lay awake listening for him not to come.

The ballroom at the Duquesne Club had three hundred people in it, all in black.

A banner over the stage read Forty Years of Brannigan.

Rowan stood at the lectern in a tuxedo. Pierce and Tobias sat at the head table.

Tobias saw me first. He put down his fork and did not take his eyes off me.

"A toast," Rowan was saying, "to the man who built all this for his sons."

Applause.

"My father taught the three of us everything. How to read a lease. How to read a room." He smiled. "How to keep a family together."

I stood very straight at the back wall.

I thought of Dad's six-minute phone calls.

"Gerard's Lizzie," a voice said at my elbow.

I turned.

A tiny white-haired woman was leaning on a cane next to me.

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