A Night With A Stranger novel · Chapter 7 of 24

Chapter 7: The Girl From the Basement

The Brodsky house sat on a hill in Lake Forest behind a gate and a hundred yards of lawn.

Evan had bought me a dress for the dinner, dark green and plain, and I wore it because my only other dress had a hole in it.

"You look right," he said in the car.

"Right for what?"

"For standing next to me."

I laughed in spite of myself, and he almost smiled.

Inside, there were twenty people at a long table under a chandelier, and every one of them already knew my face from a photograph.

Margaret Brodsky sat at the head in a silver dress and gave me a thin, polite smile.

"Everyone, this is Jada," Evan said, with his hand an inch from my back and not touching it.

"And how did you two meet?" Margaret asked.

"She spilled a drink on me," Evan said.

"On purpose," I added, and a woman near the end of the table laughed before she could stop herself.

Margaret did not laugh.

Nobody asked anything else, and they didn't have to.

Across from me sat a man with a red face and a donor's pin on his lapel.

He leaned toward his wife and said, not quite quietly enough, "That's the girl from the basement."

His wife glanced at me and looked away.

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