If you’re going in there, I’m going in with you.” I looked at my son standing there in his slightly-too-small funeral suit, having decided that he would not let his mother walk into that room alone, and I understood that I could forbid him, and that I was not going to.

Whatever was about to happen in that ballroom, it was happening to both of us, and he had earned the right to stand in it beside me rather than wait outside in the dark.

I held out my hand.

He took it.

And we went.

Chapter 16 — The Color Draining From His Face

We arrived at the grand ballroom just after eight o’clock.

The room was just what Julian had promised it would not be worth my trouble to see: enormous and glittering and full, board members and major clients and waiters gliding between them with trays of champagne, elaborate arrangements of white flowers on every table, the whole apparatus of my husband’s success on expensive display.