Seventeen years.”
“Does he know that?”
“He knows all of it.”
Ruby looked across the ballroom at Table One for a long moment, in the frank way twenty-three-year-olds look at things.
“Then it wasn’t about poor,” she said.
“He just wanted them to think he’d married down so they’d keep letting him sit there.”
I have paid consultants four figures for analysis worse than that.
So I ate the chicken.
And across the room, at Table One, I watched a family spend three hours realizing what the ballroom had heard.
Corinne came to Table Twelve during the toasts.
She crouched beside my chair — in that dress, on that floor — which I understood, immediately, was the most expensive thing she had ever done for me.
“Danielle.
There’s clearly been a misunderstanding about the — arrangement — with the venue.”
“There’s no misunderstanding.
The Thomasina Fund owns Ivywood House.
Has for three years.
You’ve been renting from us since last March.”
“Garrett never — “
“Garrett knew, Corinne.
He was there the night I bought it.”
Her face did something complicated.
“Why didn’t you say anything?”
And that is the question I have thought about the most, so I gave her the true answer.
“Because you’d have been nice to me,” I said.
“And I wanted to know what you were like when you thought I was nobody.
I found out tonight.
It took two years and it was worth it.”
She went back to Table One.
Garrett found me in the parking lot at eleven.
“Danielle.
Wait.
Please.”
I waited.
“I didn’t — that thing I said — I was stressed, my mother had been at me all week about the seating, and I just — “
“Say it back to me.”
“What?”
“The sentence.
Say it back to me, out loud, in this parking lot where nobody’s listening.
If you can’t say it to me alone, you had no business saying it in a ballroom.”
He couldn’t.
He stood in the gravel in a tuxedo and could not repeat eight words he had said three hours earlier in front of two hundred people.
