She had only ever seen the apron.

And so she read my silence, dripping on the deck, as the silence of a girl who did not know what to say — the flustered quiet of someone outclassed.

She could not have been more wrong about what she was looking at, and she was about to find out how wrong, in front of everyone whose opinion she had spent her whole life performing for.

I had been dating Callum for eight months — long enough to know the difference between a family with money and a family terrified of losing the appearance of it.

The first kind is relaxed.

The second kind performs, constantly, exhaustingly, for an audience that includes even the help.