“It’s a child’s game.”
But Taylor was not playing a game, and everyone could see it.
“The sad lady needs you,” she said, pulling at his hand with her whole small weight.
Something shifted in Corbin’s face — a flicker of a man remembering a question he’d been refusing to ask himself.
“Which lady?” he said, and he crouched, so that he was closer to her level.
Taylor pointed one finger down the corridor.
“Your mommy.”
The room went silent in a way that thirty wealthy people can only manage when they have all realized at once that they are watching something private crack open in public.
Camilla set her champagne down on the marble too hard, and the glass sang.
“Your mother isn’t even here,” she said, and her voice had a thread of panic in it that hadn’t been there a moment before.
And then Rafael stepped out of the hallway, pale, a thick black binder under his arm.
The room’s amusement curdled into something else.
A charming child was one thing; a grim-faced assistant with a binder was another entirely, and the guests — people who had spent their lives reading rooms for exactly this kind of shift — went quiet all at once, sensing that the evening had just changed key.
Camilla felt it too.