He bowed.
“Mrs.
Crawford, our deepest apologies for allowing these people to trouble you.”
Declan’s mouth opened and closed.
I lifted a hand to stop the guards before they could remove him.
“Let them in,” I said.
“I want them to hear every word.”
I want to tell you that I walked into that ballroom feeling powerful, but that isn’t the truth, and I’ve promised myself I’d only tell you the truth.
What I felt, crossing that threshold with my daughter’s hand in mine, was closer to grief.
Because every eye that turned to us, every whisper that ran along the tables, was proof of a world I had chosen to hide from for six years — a world in which I mattered, in which my name opened rooms and stilled them, in which I had never once needed to ask a small cruel man for permission to buy bread.