My father did not look at me first.

He looked at Rupert’s hand — the hand that had shoved me to the floor — and something moved behind his eyes that I had seen only a handful of times in my life, and never once directed at me.

“Continue the ceremony,” Rupert said, forcing a laugh.

“Cecilia has made an unfortunate scene.”

Cressida folded her arms.

“Security should remove her.”

My father climbed the stage, and the laughter died one table at a time, the way a wave pulls back from a shore.

He took the microphone out of Rupert’s hand, and Rupert let him, because there are men whose authority is a costume and men whose authority is simply a fact, and every person in that room could feel, watching the two of them, which was which.

“For those who have forgotten,” my father said, “or who never knew — Cecilia Marchetti is not merely my daughter.

She is the controlling beneficiary of the Ellsworth Family Trust, which holds forty-two percent of this company’s voting shares.”