Chapter 5: Mrs. Stannard

"One question," Elias said in the elevator that evening. "Ask it."

I had waited all day to ask it.

"What trust?"

"Your father's," he said. "It comes to you when you turn thirty."

"My father died when I was seventeen. There was nothing. Not a dollar."

"Desmond told you that. Desmond will tell you the rest himself in the next few days, because he can't help it."

"And you won't?"

"I will," Elias said. "When you can use it."

The doors opened on a restaurant full of men in dark suits.

"Smile, Mrs. Stannard," he said. "They're about to look at you."

It was the Stannard Group's quarterly investor dinner, twelve men and their wives around one long table.

Elias put his hand at the small of my back as we walked in, and every head turned.

"My wife," he said. "Joanna."

He said it plainly, and nobody there guessed it was only a day old.

A heavy man at the far end gave a short, mean laugh.

"The assistant," he said. "I remember her. She fetched your lunch, Elias. Now she's on the board table?"

The wives stopped talking.

I set down my napkin.

"I fetched your lunch too, sir," I said. "You tipped me four dollars on a sixty-dollar order and called me sweetheart."

Somebody coughed into a glass.

"I haven't forgotten the number," I said, and smiled. "I do intend to remember it."

The heavy man went red.

One of the wives laughed out loud, and she covered her mouth, and then the whole table was laughing with her.

Elias didn't smile.

But his thumb moved once against the bare skin above my dress, and it stayed there for the rest of dinner.

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