Chapter 6: Table Nine

The Kingsbury Foundation gala was in the same ballroom, with the same chandeliers and the same stage.

I stood at the coat check in a green dress Bea had pulled from her own closet and pinned in the back.

Rafe Stanton stood beside me, giving his ticket to a girl in a black vest.

"You're nervous," he said.

"I'm not."

"You're holding your clutch with both hands."

I took my hand off it.

"Brooks's whole circle is in there," I said. "Every one of them watched that clip and thought, poor Brooks."

"Some of them thought, poor Sylvie."

"Name one."

"Me."

I looked up.

He was not smiling, but one corner of his mouth had moved.

"Is that why you didn't clap?" I said.

"I didn't clap because the man next to me did."

"Who was it?"

"Brooks's father." His eyes went to the ballroom doors. "He clapped the longest."

The girl handed Rafe a ticket stub, and I felt his hand settle against the small of my back.

It was a light touch, steering me through the crowd.

It was not like Brooks's hand.

Brooks's hand had always been a hand that turned me where he wanted.

This one only stayed where I could feel it, and let me walk.

"I'll say this once," Rafe said, quietly. "Tonight, if you want to leave, you tell me, and we go. No questions."

"I'm not leaving."

"Then I'll stay as long as you do."

We went in.

Four hundred people turned in their chairs, one table after another.

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