“You embarrassed me for the last time,” he said.
The sentence came out low, controlled, almost businesslike. That was what scared Lenora most about him. His anger rarely looked messy. It came dressed in expensive suits, carried itself with confidence, and found a way to make her look like the unstable one.
Across the ballroom, a waiter stood frozen with a tray of champagne. Near the French doors, two women whispered behind their hands. A city councilman looked away and pretended to check his cufflinks. Everyone had seen enough to know it was wrong. No one wanted to be the first person to say so.
Lenora closed her eyes.
For a moment, she was not thirty-two years old on the floor of the Harrison Estate mansion. She was eight again, sitting on the back porch of a small wooden house in rural Georgia, listening to her grandmother Ruth hum an old hymn while shelling peas into a tin bowl. She could smell summer dirt, tomato vines, and cornbread cooling near the window. She could hear her grandfather Thomas saying, “Baby girl, true wealth is who you are when nobody’s watching.”
