Now.

You will do it on your own feet, this minute, or I will have security walk you off this property in handcuffs.

Choose quickly.”

I glanced up then, just once, and I watched Tiffany turn in a slow circle in the center of the crowd, looking for one friendly face.

These were the people whose approval she had spent years courting — the country club board, the local politicians, the hospital administrators, the whole gilded social world she had climbed toward.

Not one of them would meet her eyes.