“I’ve already handled everything.”

“Handled what?”

“Maria was drunk,” Vanessa said smoothly.

“She tried to attack me, lost her balance, and crashed into the mirror.

I was moving her into another room so this wouldn’t turn into a scandal.” And Daniel, standing in the hallway, found that he did not believe a single word of it, and the disbelief arrived not as suspicion but as certainty, built from two small facts his fiancee did not know he possessed.

The first was that Maria Collins did not drink.