Chapter 10: Eighty Percent

The ballroom went quiet from the doors inward, a row of heads turning one after another.

Vera stood at the top of the room under a chandelier in black silk and pearls.

She raised her glass to me in a toast so small that only I saw it.

I raised mine back.

Dalton was beside her with a split lip and a swollen jaw, and he held Lydia by the elbow.

Lydia wore a long grey dress and a shawl.

Her face was the color of paper.

"Smile," Brogan said, close to my ear. "We're only going to walk."

We walked.

Every few steps someone stopped us to say something kind in a voice that meant the opposite.

I smiled and said thank you each time.

Hattie slipped in at the edge of the crowd in a borrowed gown.

She and her lawyer took a table near the wall.

Across the room, Lydia swayed.

I saw it before anyone else did, because I was the only one watching her.

Her hand went to her stomach, and her shawl slid off her shoulder.

Her knees folded.

I crossed the floor and caught her before she hit the marble.

"I've got you," I said. "Lydia, look at me."

"I'm sorry," she whispered. "I can't breathe in this."

The shawl had come open.

In the grey dress, with no cardigan to hide it, her stomach was round and plain for the whole room to see.

A woman near us gasped.

Somebody lifted a phone.

"Is that," a reporter began, and stopped.

Dalton had come up behind me.

He stared down at her, and I watched him do the sum.

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