She raised one hand, and he stopped as though he’d walked into glass.

“Eight years ago,” she said, and her voice carried easily across the silent ballroom, “I married a man I met in a crowded café during a thunderstorm.

He told me that kindness mattered more than status.

He told me his family would become my family.” Her eyes moved, unhurried, to Lenette, and then to Thea.

“I believed him.” She let that sit.

“I hid what I was because I wanted a real marriage.