Chapter 18: The Gala

"Are you still going?" I asked.

A long silence on the line.

"I'm a Talcott," Quentin said. "They can take the microphone. They can't stop me walking in."

"Then walk in."

"Winnie, I promised you I'd take it back in front of the same people. Those people will be in that ballroom. If I can't get to a microphone..."

"Quentin."

He stopped.

"Get to the microphone," I said, and hung up.

Simon was looking at me over the umbrella.

"That's a terrible plan," he said.

"It's his plan. I just told him to do it."

On the fifth of December it snowed.

It started at noon and didn't stop, big wet flakes that turned the harbor gray and the hotel drive white.

Gage rented a tuxedo in Liberty. The sleeves stopped an inch above his wrists.

"Nobody's looking at my wrists," he said.

"Everybody's looking at your wrists."

The pastor came too.

He had never been on an airplane.

He held the armrests from Raleigh to Boston and told the flight attendant he was doing fine, every time she passed.

He wore his good Sunday suit and a clip-on bow tie, and he had the photo album in a grocery bag on his lap.

We came in through the front doors of the Talcott Harbor Hotel at seven.

The same doors I'd walked out of through the service kitchen a month ago.

The doorman was the same one too. He took my coat and said, "Evening, Ms. Honeycutt," and gave me a tiny nod.

The ballroom was full.

Candles and white lilies on every table.

A huge portrait of Father stood on an easel by the stage, and a smaller one of Mother beside it, in pearls.

The programs were printed in gold.

An Evening in Memory. Honoring Tinsley Talcott, Keeper of Her Mother's Legacy.

Gage read it, folded it in four and put it in his pocket.

People saw us.

The whispers went across the room, front to back.

There were two hundred people, and I knew most of the faces. The Lathrops' friends. Tinsley's friends. The board.

The reporter, at a back table, in a black dress instead of her parka.

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