Stay for the Announcement

Lavinia Merrow stood at my husband’s side in a fitted red gown, one hand resting on his arm as though she had a right to it.

As Bellweather’s communications director, she had spent months appearing beside Lucan at conferences, at dinners, at the “emergency strategy retreats” that seemed to require no one else’s attendance.

Tonight she was wearing a pair of diamond earrings I had last seen in my own jewelry box, before they went missing.

The earrings were the detail that told me she wanted to be caught, or at least that she had stopped being careful, which in a person like Lavinia amounts to the same thing.

Because a woman does not accidentally wear the wife’s earrings to the wife’s husband’s company party.

She had taken them — Lucan had given them to her, more likely, having taken them from my box himself, which was its own small violation, the casual theft of my mother’s earrings to adorn his mistress — and she had chosen to wear them to a room where I would be present.

It was a message.

It was Lavinia telling me, without words, that she had won, that she now wore the things that had been mine, that she stood in the place I used to stand.

And the terrible, delicious irony that I carried through that entire evening, smiling my pleasant wife’s smile, was that I knew something she did not: that in a matter of hours I would own the company that employed her, that I had spent six weeks documenting the fraud she’d run through her brother’s shell company, and that the earrings she wore as a trophy of her victory were about to become, in the most literal sense, evidence.

She thought the earrings meant she had taken my life.

I let her think it.

I knew they meant she was about to lose her own.

She tilted her head at me, unhurried, almost kind.

“Celestine — perhaps tonight isn’t the evening for a domestic scene.”

My shoulder still burned.

I lifted my chin.