Chapter 21: The Lobby

Bailey saw Wylie and her whole face changed again.

She dropped the glass she was holding, and it broke on the floor, and nobody looked at it.

"Wylie," she said, and held out both hands. "Thank God. Tell them. Tell them it was your idea."

He walked the length of the ballroom with every eye on him.

He stopped a few steps from her and did not take her hands.

"It was your idea," he said.

"You said it. You told me at dinner it was the best lesson you had ever planned."

"I said that because you had spent an hour telling me it was mine."

"That's not fair."

"I remember that dinner. I remember every line."

His voice was level and quiet.

"You said it was what I do for a living."

Bailey's chin trembled.

"I took care of you my whole life," she said. "Your mother held me at my father's funeral. You said I was your sister."

"I know I did."

"And now you're going to stand there with her and let them do this."

She waved a hand at the whole room, at the dean, at me.

"I'm going to stand here," Wylie said. "That's what she asked me to do."

I realized he meant me.

Bailey looked from him to me, and I watched her understand it.

"Oh," she said. "You two."

"Not like that," I said.

"You think it matters? He's going to leave you the second you stop being useful. He leaves everybody who stops being useful."

"That's an interesting thing to know about him," said Cal, at my shoulder, mildly. "Seeing how you've been his sister for twenty years."

She turned on him.

"Who are you?"

"I fix backs," said Cal. "Yours looks tense."

Somebody near the stage made a small sound that might have been a laugh.

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