How to Tame a Silver Fox novel · Chapter 19 of 32

Chapter 19: The Shower

I wore my mother's emerald dress, pinned at the hem, and I carried the gift in both hands.

Arlen let me out at the gate and stayed with the car.

I walked up the drive alone, with sixty women's cars parked down both sides of it.

The housekeeper took my coat without a word and looked at the box.

The drawing room had been turned into a tea garden.

White chairs, white roses, a six-tier cake with a sugar stork, and a young man with a video camera on a tripod in the corner.

He had been hired to film the gifts for the wedding video.

Sabrina sat at the center in a pale pink dress.

Her mother sat beside her, a tall woman in pearls the size of grapes and a smile with no one behind it.

Two seats from the end I saw the investor's wife in pearls from the dinner, who had put her fork down very slowly that night.

She looked at me, and she did not look away.

"Willa," Sabrina said, in her sweetest voice. "You came."

"I wouldn't miss it."

"And you brought the paper, I hope."

"I brought a gift."

"How lovely." Her eyes went to the box. "We were just beginning."

They went through the gifts in order.

A silver christening cup.

Monogrammed towels.

A hand-knit blanket from a woman who cried while she gave it.

Sabrina thanked each one by name, touched her flat stomach in the pauses, and said how blessed she felt.

I sat in the last white chair with my box on my knees.

When the pile was gone, her mother held out her hand.

"And one from the stepdaughter," she said. "How nice. We were beginning to think you'd forgotten us."

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