The slightly lesser gift.

The absence of the warmth that had been lavished, a moment before, on everyone else.

Beatrice was an artist of the almost, of the just-barely, of the insult calibrated so finely that it left no fingerprints.

And Chloe, sitting there in her steamed gold dress with her hands folded, waiting, had learned to feel that cooling coming the way you feel a cold front move in, and to brace herself against it, and to keep her polite little smile in place while it arrived.

And here is the detail about that which I find hardest to forgive, harder even than the cruelty itself: that Chloe never stopped being polite to Beatrice.