Chapter 10: The Family Dinner

"Dinner," I said. "Tomorrow night. I'll come."

Yvonne clutched her bag to her chest. "Wynne, that message is nothing, it's a mistake in a calendar."

"Then dinner will be short."

She went out of the suite so fast she forgot her veil on the sofa.

I held it up to the window light and thought about how many times I'd been told something was a kindness.

The next night, Anson walked me up the steps of the Sedgwick house in Greenwich.

It was a white stone mansion with a gravel drive and a fountain.

It did not look like a place where anyone had ever been hurt.

"You don't have to do this," he said.

"I know."

"I'll be at your elbow the whole time."

"Don't be," I said. "If you rescue me in front of them, they'll think I need it."

He looked at me for a long beat, then nodded once.

"Then I'll be the man at the end of the table who looks bored," he said.

"You're very good at that."

"I've practiced."

A butler took our coats. Through the arch I saw a long table set for fourteen, white linen and silver, with candles.

Aunts, uncles, cousins in good wool, the whole polite Sedgwick tribe that turned up for funerals and galas.

They all stopped talking when I came in.

Preston stood at the head of the table with a glass in his hand and his face arranged into mildness.

"Everyone," Yvonne said brightly, "this is Wynne."

Not one of them said a word.

Then an older woman near the end, with a helmet of white hair, burst into tears.

"She's the image of her grandfather," the woman sobbed. "She has his jaw."

A cousin laughed nervously. Someone pulled out a chair for me beside Lila.

My twin sat in a pale blue dress with her hand around her water glass, looking like a candle about to go out.

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