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""Alessia was already lowering herself into the gold chair when it vanished from beneath her.
For one bewildering fraction of a second, her body continued obeying a piece of furniture that was no longer there.
Her knees bent, her weight shifted backward, and her right hand dropped instinctively toward the white padded seat she expected to find.
Her fingers closed on empty air.
The marble struck her hip first.
Then her palm.
Then something in her left ankle gave with a small internal sensation that was worse than a crack because she felt it more than heard it.
A champagne glass tipped somewhere behind her, and the delicate sound of it breaking seemed absurdly polite.
Alessia sat stunned on the ballroom floor with her hair across one cheek and one hand still extended as if the chair might somehow return.
Behind her, Veronica held the chair by its gilded backrest.
The bride's mouth carried the smallest trace of satisfaction.
Not laughter.
Not surprise.
Something quieter.
Something that disappeared the instant people began turning around.
Alessia looked at her.
Veronica released the chair and smoothed one hand over the sparkling white fabric at her waist.
“Did you leave your eyes at home?”
For several seconds, Alessia couldn't answer.
The ballroom had been warm a moment earlier.
Now the marble under her palm felt strangely cold.
Around them, conversations broke apart unevenly as guests noticed the woman on the floor, then the bride, then the displaced chair.
A waiter stopped with a tray against his chest.
Someone near the floral centerpiece whispered, “What happened?”
Alessia tried to stand.
That was when fear arrived.
She planted her right hand against the floor and pushed, expecting the ordinary cooperation of her legs.
Her right leg responded.
Her left did not.
Pain flashed upward from somewhere below her knee, but beneath the pain was something more frightening.
Absence.
She dropped back hard enough to jar her teeth.
“Don't.”
The voice came from several feet away.
Dr. Cole was already moving toward her.
He had been seated at the end of the nearest banquet table, and in his hurry he caught the edge of a gold chair with his thigh.
It scraped loudly across the marble.
“Everybody give her some room.”
A dark-haired man reached Alessia first and crouched beside her.
“Can I help you up?”
“No.”
Dr. Cole's answer was sharper than he intended.
He lowered himself beside Alessia with one knee on the marble and looked at her face before looking at her leg.
“Alessia, stay where you are.”
She swallowed.
“I was just sitting down.”
“I know.”
“I didn't see—”
“Don't worry about that right now.”
His calmness frightened her more than panic would have.
Dr. Cole touched her lower leg carefully, asking where she hurt, whether she could move her toes, whether she had hit her head.
Alessia answered the first two questions badly and the third twice.
“No, I didn't hit my head.”
Then, quieter, “I don't think I hit my head.”
The dark-haired man shifted away enough to give Dr. Cole room.
Alessia stared at the hem of her pale taupe-gray dress gathered uselessly around her legs.
Her left shoe looked wrong.
Not dramatically wrong.
That would almost have been easier.
It simply seemed to belong to somebody else's body.
“Can you move your toes for me?”
Alessia tried.
Her breathing stopped.
“Again?”
She tried harder.
Nothing.
She touched Dr. Cole's sleeve.
“I can't feel my foot.”
His expression changed.
Only slightly, but she saw it.
“Don't move the leg.”
“I wasn't going to.”
“Good.”
“Is it broken?”
“I don't know yet.”
“What does that mean?”
“It means I'm not guessing.”
Across the ballroom, Valerio stopped listening to the man speaking to him.
The interruption was so complete that the man followed Valerio's gaze and fell silent too.
Valerio had seen Alessia on the floor.
Then he saw Dr. Cole kneeling beside her.
Then he saw Veronica standing over them.
He crossed the ballroom without running.
People moved before he asked them to.
At six foot five and built heavily enough that his black suit seemed to make him broader rather than slimmer, Valerio had spent most of his adult life learning not to use size as punctuation.
He did not shove through the guests.
He did not call Alessia's name.
He simply walked toward her, and the conversations along his path died one by one.
Alessia noticed his polished black shoes before she looked up.
“I'm okay.”
Dr. Cole glanced at her.
“No, you're not.”
“I mean I'm not dying.”
“That is a very low standard.”
Under other circumstances she might have laughed.
Instead, her mouth trembled once.
Valerio looked from her face to her leg.
“What happened?”
Nobody answered immediately.
That silence told him more than an answer might have.
Veronica folded her arms.
The gesture looked almost casual, except her fingers were gripping her upper arms.
“She fell.”
Valerio looked at the gold chair several feet behind her.
Alessia closed her eyes.
She did not want this.
She did not even know what this was yet, only that forty people had suddenly become witnesses to something humiliating and private.
Dr. Cole asked the dark-haired man to find someone from the venue and have emergency medical services called.
The man stood immediately.
Veronica exhaled through her nose.
“Oh, come on.”
Dr. Cole looked up.
“What?”
“She doesn't need an ambulance.”
“You're making this into a whole production.”
Alessia opened her eyes.
“Veronica.”
It came out softer than she intended.
The bride looked down at her.
For a moment something complicated passed through Veronica's face.
Annoyance remained there, but underneath it was calculation.
“She’s exaggerating,” Veronica said.
Valerio turned his head.
Veronica noticed.
“She always does.”
Nobody moved.
The quartet near the far wall had stopped playing, although Alessia hadn't noticed exactly when.
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One violinist still held her bow above the strings.
At a nearby table, an older woman quietly lowered her phone after apparently deciding that recording this would be indecent.
