Chapter 4

I knew that long table well — the one for the family's quarterly dinner. For three years I'd stood beside it, worked beside it, been ordered around beside it, and never once actually sat down at it. I knew which side of the cloth faced up, knew every elder's tolerance for wine, knew whose glass to fill before it ran dry. This time, Damien seated me at his right hand — the seat, in this family, that belonged to one of their own.

When I sat, I could feel every gaze at the table land on my face first, then drop to this hand of mine wearing the old family ring.

Halfway through the meal, Adrian's mother — Margaret, Damien's sister-in-law — finally spoke, turning her wineglass slowly by the stem. "Damien, defending someone in the heat of the moment, that's forgivable. But letting a girl from nowhere sit at the Hartwell head table — how do you think that looks? She doesn't even have a decent family name—"

"Margaret." Damien set down his knife and fork. A small sound, metal against porcelain — and the whole table went still.

"I seem to recall," he said, his voice level, and yet it stopped everyone cold, "three years ago, when the budget for the family's charity auction came apart at the seams — who spent the whole night re-checking three hundred names, one by one, so the Hartwells wouldn't be humiliated in front of their guests?"

No one spoke.

"Last winter, in the old man's final days, when everyone found the hospital smell too much to sit with — who went every afternoon to read him the papers, until he fell asleep, and then tiptoed out?"

Under the table, my hand quietly closed into a fist. I'd never told anyone those things. I'd thought those afternoons, those lists of names, were stones dropped down a deep well — not even an echo coming back.

"You look down on her for having no family name," Damien said, moving his gaze across every face at the table, one by one. "But these three years, the person who actually held this family together was her. Not one of you. Elena's family name is herself. And that's enough. Anyone who still has an objection is welcome to leave this table."

No one said another word for the rest of that meal. Adrian, across and down the table, sat with a knife in one hand and a fork in the other and didn't touch his food. He just stared at me — like it was the first time he'd really seen who had always been missing from this table he'd sat at half his life. He must have been remembering, too, how at every dinner like this, it used to be me standing behind him, keeping track of whose glass to raise and whose name to avoid. And now I was sitting, and he was watching, with the whole length of the table between us.

After dinner I stood a long while alone on the terrace. The night air was cold; thin mist drifted over the river. Damien came out and, once again, laid a jacket over my shoulders — he always seemed to remember my shoulders got cold.

"Thank you," I said. "For tonight. And for that day, at the church."

He looked out into the dark garden a long time before he answered. "I'm not doing this out of pity. I just couldn't stand watching a person who deserved to be treated well not get so much as one fair word in this house."

Neither of us said anything more. And then, in the cold, I heard a soft sound behind me. I turned. Celeste, with a glass in her hand, had been standing in the terrace doorway — for who knew how long.

She lifted her glass at me, her smile thin. "Next week's charity gala," she said. "Elena — I do hope you'll come."