Adrienne, watching from the corridor, saw the precise moment the fiancée understood that she had lost control of the night: a flicker, quickly hidden, of a gambler who has just seen a card she cannot explain.
Everything Camilla had built rested on Corbin trusting her voice over every other voice in his life.
And a three-year-old and a shaking assistant had just, between them, put a second voice in the room — and Corbin was, for the first time in a year, listening to it.
“She’s in the study, Corbin,” he said, steady despite everything it was costing him.
“And this time, you really need to hear what she has to say.”
Chapter 10 — The Study
Corbin looked at his assistant as though a piece of furniture had spoken — as though the loyal, quiet man who managed his calendar had turned, in an instant, into someone he didn’t know.
The ballroom held its breath.
Thirty guests, senators and developers and people whose names were on buildings, stood frozen in the awful courtesy of witnesses to a disaster they couldn’t politely leave.
“This is grotesque,” Camilla said, stepping forward with a smile stretched tight over something frightened.
“Corbin, your mother is staging a scene at our engagement party.
You are not honestly going to fall for it.”
He looked at her — at the smooth voice that had steered him for a year, that had talked him out of his own family and his own instincts one reasonable sentence at a time.
And then he looked down at the little girl who was still holding his hand, looking up at him with a clarity none of the adults in that room had shown him in months.