Chapter 8: The League Lunch

The Piedmont Club dining room smelled of lilies and chicken salad.

A hundred and twenty women in pastel suits sat at round tables under chandeliers, and the league's gavel lay beside a silver pitcher.

I took a table at the back, behind a column, with Rhona in a borrowed cardigan.

Nathan stood against the far wall in a gray suit, looking bored.

Camille sat at the head table with Talbot's mother, in pale pink, with her hand on the older woman's arm.

They had the air of two people who had finally won.

Talbot's mother stood and tapped a glass.

"Ladies," she said. "Before dessert, a word of thanks to our spring committee."

Her eyes slid across the room and snagged on me.

She stopped for exactly one breath, and then she kept going, because she was a woman who had never once stopped in public.

A chair scraped near the front.

"Mom," Talbot said.

He stood at the second table in a dark suit, with his hands at his sides.

She did not look at him.

"Talbot, sit down, dear. This is the women's league."

"I know what it is."

"Then sit."

"I'm going to say something first," he said.

It was not loud, but it carried.

The whole room turned.

I saw his throat move.

"The woman at the back is Sophia Bulloch," he said. "I divorced her the morning after she lost our baby."

A soft, shocked sound went around the tables.

"Talbot Berrien," his mother said, in a voice like a ruler.

"The photo was forged."

Nobody breathed.

"The report was forged too. A clerk at a storefront lab in Chamblee was paid fifty thousand dollars to type a zero."

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