Two Hearts That Could Never Meet novel · Chapter 13 of 24

Chapter 13: What a Mother Does

I stood up from table four.

My chair scraped, and three hundred heads turned to the sound.

I walked across the ballroom floor to the table where Constance sat.

She wore gray silk, and she had her water glass in her hand.

She set the glass down before I reached her.

"Millicent, dear," she said. "Sit with me. We'll talk at home."

"We'll talk here."

"This is not the place."

"You picked the place," I said. "You picked the table, too."

The older man beside her moved his chair an inch away.

Nobody else in the room made a sound.

"Did you pay her?" I asked.

Constance looked at me for a long time.

I had seen her look at florists that way, and at waiters.

I had seen it once on a senator who used the wrong fork.

I had never seen it aimed at me.

"Yes," she said.

The word went out across the tables.

"Two million dollars," Lawrence said from the stage. His voice carried without the microphone. "Say the rest, Mother."

"I did what a mother does."

She said it evenly. She did not stand.

"Your father had been dead three years. You were twenty-five and you had stopped eating. You sat in that girl's apartment with the curtains shut, and you talked about marrying her."

"I wanted to," Lawrence said.

"She was a lovely, clever girl who would have dragged you down with her, and I could see it. I offered her a way out. She took it in a day."

On my left, a woman made a small noise into her napkin.

I looked at Constance's hands. They were folded on the tablecloth, and they were perfectly steady.

"And me?" I said.

"You were a waitress with a kind face who tipped the busboy out of her own pocket. I watched you three mornings in a row."

"You tipped me five hundred dollars."

"I did."

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