The ice hit me before the words did. One second I was standing in the doorway of the Belmont Country Club ballroom, blinking as my eyes adjusted from the afternoon sunlight to the warm glow of chandeliers. The next, a shock of cold splashed across my face, soaking my collar, running down into my shirt in jagged rivulets.
Conversations stopped mid-sentence. Forks hovered halfway to lips. Someone’s laugh died in the air like a skipped note on a record.
My stepmother’s hand still held the sweating glass, tilted in midair, as if she herself couldn’t quite believe what she’d just done. “You are not family,” Linda said, and her voice rang against the vaulted ceiling, sharp and bright enough to cut. “You weren’t invited.
Leave before you ruin this day like you ruin everything else.”
I heard a spoon clink against china. In the corner, the pianist’s fingers stumbled off the keys and stilled. Fifty pairs of eyes turned toward me, some wide with shock, some narrowed with curiosity, several already looking away as if that might erase what they had just witnessed.
Cold water dripped from my chin. My shirt clung to my chest. I smelled lemon, ice, and the faint, expensive perfume Linda always wore, something floral and icy at the same time.
Behind her, my father stood near the head table, his birthday banner hanging crookedly above him. He looked like someone had pulled a rug out from under his feet. His mouth opened, then closed.
His hand, still holding a whiskey glass, twitched once, as though he might step forward. He didn’t. So I took a breath and did the only thing that kept my knees from trembling: I reached over, plucked a napkin from the nearest table, and dabbed my face like a man who’d simply spilled soup on himself.
Then I smiled. “You’ll regret that,” I said quietly, not loud enough for the whole room, but loud enough for her. It wasn’t a threat.
It was a simple prediction, like saying it was going to snow in Boston in January. Linda’s eyes flared. “Security—”
The ballroom doors behind me swung open with a soft, heavy whoosh of air.
“Evan?” a deep voice boomed from the entrance. “Evan Hale, is that you?”
The sound rolled through the room like distant thunder. Heads turned in unison, the way wheat bends when wind moves across a field.
I turned too, blinking water from my lashes. Jonathan Reed stood framed in the doorway, silhouetted by the afternoon light from the marble foyer behind him. Tall, silver-haired, impeccably dressed in a navy suit that probably cost more than my car, he looked exactly like the business magazines always pictured him—except they never quite managed to capture the warmth in his eyes when he smiled.
Right now, he was smiling at me. He didn’t hesitate, didn’t glance around to take the social temperature, didn’t pause to ask permission. He walked straight through the stunned crowd, past the table of my father’s colleagues, past the cluster of cousins and distant relatives, past my stepmother with her frozen hand and empty glass.
“Evan, my boy,” he said, pulling me into a hug that smelled faintly of cologne and airplane cabins. His arm wrapped around my shoulders with easy familiarity, like we’d done this a hundred times. “How have you been?
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