Chương 2
“You recognized something that belonged to my mother and decided the most reasonable explanation was that I didn’t.”
Eleanor’s jaw tightened.
Daniel glanced around them.
Several guests looked away too late.
One had a phone in his hand.
Daniel’s expression hardened.
“Claire.”
She followed his gaze.
The man lowered his phone.
Too late.
Eleanor saw it too.
For the first time since the jade hit the floor, irritation returned to her face, but it had nowhere clean to go. She looked toward the attendant.
“Samuel.”
The man with the tray approached.
“Yes, Mrs. Harrow?”
“Please ask Mr. Vance to have the library opened.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“And ask security not to make a spectacle of anyone’s phones.”
Samuel’s eyes flickered toward the guests.
“Of course.”
Claire almost admired the sentence. It sounded polite and achieved the exact opposite of politeness.
Eleanor looked at her again.
“Five minutes.”
Claire shook her head.
“I don’t owe you five minutes.”
“No.”
That answer surprised her.
Eleanor glanced at the pendant in Claire’s hand.
“You don’t.”
A dozen responses crowded Claire’s throat. Most were angry. A few were childish. One sounded exactly like Evelyn and therefore frightened her enough to remain unspoken.
Daniel leaned toward her.
“We can leave.”
Claire looked at the ballroom entrance.
Leaving was what she wanted.
Leaving was what her mother had always done when the past started asking questions.
Claire had spent her childhood moving before dawn because Evelyn preferred empty highways. She had watched her mother avoid certain surnames in newspapers. She had seen her close a laptop once when a photograph of the Harrow Foundation appeared beside an article about a hospital donation.
When Claire was fourteen, she had asked whether they were related to anyone famous.
Evelyn had laughed too loudly.
“We’re related to people who know where we live. That’s enough.”
At the time Claire had thought it was a joke.
Now Eleanor Harrow stood three feet away holding the other half of a stone Claire had seen every day of her life.
Claire looked at Daniel.
“Five minutes.”
Daniel studied her.
“You sure?”
“No.”
He nodded.
“Okay.”
That was one of the things she loved about him. He almost never confused certainty with permission.
Eleanor led them away from the ballroom.
No one stopped them.
People made space without admitting they were doing it.
Claire kept the broken chain wrapped around two fingers as she walked. She had no pocket in the red dress. Evelyn would have complained about that. Her mother had considered dresses without pockets evidence that women had been tricked into paying for handbags.
The thought came so suddenly that Claire nearly stopped.
Daniel noticed.
“What?”
She shook her head.
“Nothing.”
He did not ask again.
The library stood behind dark wood doors at the end of a quiet corridor. It smelled faintly of wax and old paper, despite the fact that the building was less than twenty years old and most of the books looked selected for their bindings.
Eleanor entered first.
Daniel waited for Claire.
She went in.
Samuel closed the doors behind them and remained outside.
For a moment, Eleanor seemed unsure where to stand.
Claire found that more unsettling than the arrogance.
The Eleanor Harrow she knew from magazine photographs had occupied podiums, hospital wings, museum galas and fundraising stages. She had a way of standing with one shoulder slightly forward, chin level, as though photographers had been invented as a minor inconvenience to be managed.
That woman was gone.
Eleanor sat on the edge of a leather chair.
“May I see it?”
“No.”
Eleanor nodded.
Daniel remained beside Claire.
Eleanor looked at him.
“You said her mother was found with the matching half missing.”
“I said what Claire told me.”
Claire frowned.
“That’s not exactly what I told you.”
Daniel looked at her.
“No?”
“She was found with the pendant. The note said the other piece was missing.”
Daniel nodded once.
“You’re right.”
Eleanor leaned forward.
“What note?”
Claire wished she had refused the room.
She wished she and Daniel were already in the car, arguing about whether to stop for fries on the way home because neither of them had eaten enough of the tiny food circulating on silver trays.
Instead she heard herself say, “My mother died seven months ago.”
Eleanor’s face tightened.
“How?”
Claire looked down at the jade.
“Someone tried to take her necklace outside a grocery store.”
Eleanor said nothing.
“He grabbed the chain. She grabbed it back. She fell.”
Claire stopped.
She had told the story enough times to know where the words became dangerous.
Daniel took over.
“She hit her head on the curb.”
Eleanor closed her eyes.
Claire disliked her for that.
She knew the reaction was unfair. Grief made arithmetic out of things that should not have been compared, and Claire had spent seven months resenting anyone who looked too sad about a woman they had not known.
“She was conscious in the ambulance,” Claire said. “She kept asking about the jade.”
Eleanor opened her eyes.
“The police recovered it?”
“Yes.”
“And the note?”
Claire hesitated.
“When we cleaned out her apartment, I found a small envelope in her jewelry box. She’d written my name on it.”
“What did it say?”
Claire almost answered.
Then anger returned.
“Why should I tell you anything?”
Eleanor sat back.
“You shouldn’t.”
Daniel’s eyes moved between them.
Eleanor looked older in the library than she had beneath the chandeliers. The warm ballroom light had sharpened her into something polished. Here the shadows beneath her eyes were visible.
“I had a daughter named Evelyn,” she said. “She died twenty-three years ago.”
Claire’s fingers tightened around the stone.
“My mother was alive seven months ago.”
“I understand what you’re saying.”
“No, you don’t.”
“You’re right.”
Claire blinked.
Eleanor looked toward the bookshelves.
“She was twenty.”
“Who?”
“My daughter.”
Claire hated that the answer hurt.
May you like
Eleanor continued carefully.
“She left home after an argument. There was an accident two nights later. A car went through a barrier on Old Mill Road and ended up in the river.”
