Chapter 7: The Toast

Three weeks after the night on his desk, the Calder Maritime Gala was held at the old customs house, under a ceiling painted with ships.

Three hundred people in black tie stood on the marble floor.

Tobias Wrentham stood at the center of them, with his right wrist in a white cast and his left arm around Lacey's waist.

She wore green silk and my grandmother's pearl earrings.

I knew because I had left them at Father's house in a velvet box.

"Breathe," Valentin said at my ear.

"I am."

"Your hand is a fist."

I looked down.

It was. I opened it, one finger at a time.

I wore a red dress that Doyle's tailor had finished in two days.

It left my shoulders bare and the half-moon scar on my palm in plain sight.

Valentin wore black, and a hand on the small of my back that I wanted to lean into and did not.

"Remember," he said. "Public. In person. Everything he owns."

"I remember."

On the little stage, a banker tapped a microphone.

"Friends! Before dinner, a bit of happy news from a dear friend of this foundation."

Tobias took the mic left-handed.

"Thank you," he said, with the voice he saved for donors. "Lacey and I have been through a hard few weeks. I lost someone I loved very much."

Lacey pressed her fingers to her eyes.

"And in grief," Tobias said, "you find out what's real. Lacey has been my rock. She's agreed to be my wife."

The room applauded.

A woman near me whispered, "Poor man, his fiancée just ran off, didn't she?"

I walked into the center of the floor.

I walked slowly, so the red dress would catch the light, and the clapping died one table at a time.

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