I saw it happen — the small turning of heads, the quick glances away, the careful resumption of talk at a slightly higher volume that people use when they have witnessed something ugly and would prefer not to have.

No one stepped forward.

He was, after all, the man they all believed was about to run the company, and there is no one more invisible than a wife being quietly disposed of by a powerful man at his own party.

I had become, in that instant, the most invisible kind of person there is.

Not unseen — several of them had seen it perfectly well — but unacknowledged, which is worse, because being unseen is an accident and being unacknowledged is a choice, made quickly and in concert, by a room full of people who had each decided that their own comfort was worth more than my dignity.

My shoulder burned beneath the blue silk.