I looked at the earrings, and I looked at the hand on my husband’s arm, and I felt the old familiar heat climb the back of my neck — not quite anger, not yet, but its careful, banked precursor, the thing I had spent years learning to keep from showing on my face.

Camilla caught me looking.

She did not look away, the way a woman with any shame would have.

She held my gaze with the serene confidence of a person who has been assured, repeatedly and by someone she trusts, that she has already won.

There is a particular blindness that comes to people who have been promised a victory by someone they trust.

They stop watching.