Chapter 13: Three Things I Can Swear To

Nobody in the ballroom made a sound.

Then three hundred phones started recording at once.

Helen was still smiling, with her hand pressed flat to her pearls.

"There," she said into the microphone, very gently. "Now everyone knows what kind of woman she is."

Preston did not look at his mother.

He came across the stage, took my elbow, and said in my ear, "Not here. Please. Come with me."

"Let go of me."

"I'm not holding you. I'm asking."

His hand was open, and it was shaking.

I looked at Elias at the foot of the steps, and he gave me one nod.

I went with Preston.

He led me behind the velvet curtain, past a busboy flattened against the wall, through a steel door marked Service.

It closed behind us, and the roar of the ballroom dropped to a hum.

We were in a concrete stairwell with a bare bulb and a smell of floor wax.

"Four years," Preston said.

His voice cracked on it, and then it got loud.

"Four years, Lydia! Did you sleep next to me to get into my mother's files? Did you laugh at my jokes for that?"

"Yes, to the files."

"Say it again."

"I wanted what she did to my father in writing, and I wanted to be near the people who kept her papers."

He hit the wall with the flat of his hand, and the whole stairwell rang.

"And me? I was the key?"

"At the start."

"At the start." He laughed, and it was an awful sound. "I proposed to you in a freight elevator."

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