Total pages in book: 47
Estimated words: 42790 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 214(@200wpm)___ 171(@250wpm)___ 143(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 42790 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 214(@200wpm)___ 171(@250wpm)___ 143(@300wpm)
I don’t know how to answer any of their questions.
I really did think he’d be here tonight. I want to be fair to myself about at least that much. This is one of the most important nights of the entire year for the company, for my father’s foundation, the ball he built up out of nothing with his own name and his own stubbornness, and not once in six months of marriage did Trey let me walk into a single Waymakers function on anything but his arm. So I dressed the way a wife dresses to stand beside her husband. And then, an hour before the car was due, my phone rang, and it was Bills, and Bills is far too decent a man to have enjoyed one word of what he’d been sent to say. I could hear how little he enjoyed it, the careful apology threaded through every pause. He was sorry, he said. So sorry to be the one calling. But Mr. Flint thought it best that I come to the ball on my own this evening.
On my own. As though I were a coat he’d thought better of bringing.
Inside, the tall doors swing shut behind me and the whole shrieking circus of the carpet falls away at once, and I let myself breathe, finally, four in and six out the way Dr. Meyers taught me a lifetime ago, because at least in here there is no press. In here I’m free of the questions, free of the bulbs and the rope and the shouted name that isn’t mine.
But I’m not free of her.
Ronna Roswell.
Everyone knows who Ronna Roswell is. You would have to have spent the last decade at the bottom of the sea not to know that face; it’s sold perfume from the side of every bus in this city and looked down forty feet tall from the billboards over the bridges, and in person, across the whole gleaming length of a crowded ballroom, she is somehow even more than all of that, tall and bright and laughing in a column of deep crimson that the entire room keeps quietly arranging itself around without seeming to notice it’s doing it.
And worse, so much worse, everyone also knows she used to date my husband.
Whom she is standing beside right now.
They’re talking, the two of them, close, her bright head tipped up toward his dark one the way a flower turns toward the thing it wants, and she’s laughing at whatever he’s just said to her, and she keeps touching him while she laughs. That’s the part I can’t stop watching, the part that gets in under my ribs and turns. Her hand on his arm. Her palm pressed to his chest, spread over the lapel I happen to know the cost of because I was there in the quiet little shop the morning it was fitted. Her fingers light at his jaw, brushing away something that was never there to begin with, touching him and touching him and touching him with the careless, fluent ease of a woman who has touched him a thousand times before and has decided, tonight, in front of all these watching people, to remind the entire room that she still might.
She is acting like my husband is hers.
And somewhere high above us the band finds the first low notes of something slow, and all around the bright edges of the room couples begin drifting out toward the open floor, and Ronna Roswell slides her hand into the crook of my husband’s arm as though it had been built to fit there, and turns him, gently, toward the music.
And that’s when I feel it begin, the very thing Dr. Meyers warned me about, my own heart picking up a rhythm it was never built to carry, the careful four-in, six-out of it coming quietly apart in my chest. The room tilts a half-degree. I must lose a little color, because that’s the moment I feel someone arrive at my side, and I turn, and it’s Troy.
The room notices him before I’ve finished turning. It always does. A woman near us touches her husband’s sleeve and says something behind her hand; two girls by the champagne go still and bright the way girls do; an older man I half recognize from the foundation board straightens out of his slouch and lifts a hand in a small salute, the kind men give to other men they’ve privately decided to be impressed by. Troy Barrymore walks into a room and the room rearranges itself to make him the center of the story it’s telling tonight, and he does it without appearing to know he’s doing it at all, which I’ve come to understand is the entire trick of him.
But right now he isn’t looking at any of them. He’s looking at me, and his gaze narrows.