Chapter 13: The Founders' Gala

The Founders' Gala filled the ballroom with four hundred people in black and gold.

I stood against the back wall in my club polo, because staff had been told to attend and nobody had told us to dress.

Birdie stood beside me in a navy suit that smelled like cedar.

"Tonight isn't the night to look pretty," she said. "It's the night to look like his daughter."

I hadn't seen Ramsay since dawn.

He sat alone at the head table, in a black suit and no tie, with a chair card in front of him that said CHAIR.

A faint shadow still lay along his left cheekbone, where my hand had landed.

He didn't look at me, and he didn't look at the door, and he didn't touch his glass.

At ten past eight, Stanford Lorring stepped up to the podium in a tuxedo with a gray folder under his arm.

The room went quiet.

"Friends," he said. "Eighteen years ago, this club lost a landmark to fire."

"Tonight we close that chapter."

He opened the folder and read the title of the report in a warm, grave voice.

Then he read the cause.

Pool chemicals left unsecured by the head groundskeeper.

He said my father's full name into the microphone, slowly, so that every table could hear it.

"Negligence resulting in total loss. Dismissed for cause. The board regrets the matter."

A man at the third table murmured, "Poor fellow."

I felt Birdie's hand close on my elbow.

Then it let go.

I walked.

Four hundred heads turned as I came down the aisle between the tables, and nobody reached out to stop me.

Stanford saw me coming, and he smiled.

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