Chapter 15: Ask

Imogen did not take Camille's hands.

"Nice dress," she said.

Camille's smile flickered and came back.

"Isn't it? I found it in a magazine."

"There was never a magazine."

Percy's arm tightened under her fingers.

Then the orchestra stopped, and a spotlight found the stage, and Camille swept away across the ballroom in ivory, trailing two thousand stares.

She took the microphone from its stand and smiled at the room.

"Good evening, Asterhaven," she said. "Edith Wexford could not be with us tonight, so I have the honor of hosting in her place."

Applause rolled through the hall.

"And tonight, as Edith wished, the Wexford family settles a private matter in public."

She turned and held out one white hand.

"Imogen? Come and sign."

Imogen climbed the steps alone.

She knew every face below her.

She saw the women from the Harbor Lunch, and the lavender suit in the third row, and Percy's mother seated at the front with her hands folded.

A table stood on the stage with a pen and a single page on it.

The page was her divorce, drawn up by Percy's lawyers, ending the marriage on the spot.

Imogen picked up the pen.

"One moment," Camille said into the microphone. "First, a tribute. For everyone who ever loved this family."

The screens above the stage flared white.

Photographs of Edith's garden began to scroll past, one after another.

Percy in the roses at nine years old, then Percy at twenty with a tennis racket, then Percy laughing beside a girl in a yellow dress.

Every one of them had been cropped, and every cropped edge ran straight through the place where Imogen should have been.

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