Part 2
“This is my brother’s house too,” she said.
“My husband is dead.”
The bluntness of it passed through Beatrice’s face.
Elena continued. “Greyhaven belongs to me. You will leave.”
“For defending Daniel?”
“For putting your hand on Avery.”
Beatrice’s pearl necklace rose and fell once against her throat. “You have always confused indulgence with love. That girl has taken advantage of you for years.”
Avery’s breathing changed.
Elena stepped between them.
“Do not speak to her again.”
Beatrice looked toward Daniel, expecting reinforcement.
Daniel had picked up his phone, but not the report. The red mark on his cheek was deepening. He seemed to notice the guests watching him and sat straighter.
“Aunt Beatrice was trying to prevent a scene,” he said.
Nora’s expression did not change, though her eyes moved to him.
Elena looked at her son for a long moment.
“She was the scene.”
Daniel’s jaw tightened. “You hit me in front of everyone.”
“Yes.”
“You think that makes you better?”
“No.”
The answer unsettled him more than a defense would have.
Elena turned to Nora. “Please ask security to escort Beatrice to her car. Quietly.”
Beatrice laughed again, but there was less certainty in it.
“You cannot be serious.”
“I am.”
“This family will hear about it.”
“They were here.”
Two members of the estate’s security staff appeared at the top of the steps. They wore dark suits rather than uniforms because Elena disliked turning private events into exhibitions of force. Both men stopped at a respectful distance.
Beatrice looked around the ballroom, perhaps searching for someone willing to call Elena unreasonable before she was led away.
No one did.
Not even Daniel.
Beatrice lifted her chin and walked toward the steps. Her rigid posture did not break until she passed Avery. Then she slowed.
“You have no idea what you’ve done,” she said.
Avery looked down at the chair.
Elena moved before Beatrice could say anything else.
“Keep walking.”
Beatrice did.
The carved doors closed behind her.
The silence that followed was worse than the noise of departure. It held the scraping of chairs, the clink of abandoned glasses, and the soft friction of expensive fabric as guests passed one another without deciding where to look.
Sloane remained beside the luncheon table.
She was thirty, self-contained, and usually so composed that strangers mistook control for coldness. Her pale green dress had been chosen to complement the ballroom’s ivory walls. The engagement ring on her left hand caught the chandelier light when she folded her arms.
“Daniel,” she said.
He looked at her.
“Did you see how it started?”
Daniel glanced toward Avery. “I saw enough.”
“That wasn’t my question.”
“Sloane, not now.”
Her face changed by less than an inch. Elena had watched Sloane negotiate a labor dispute in one of her father’s hotels with more visible emotion.
“Then when?”
Daniel stood.
His phone remained on the sofa beside the sealed report.
“This has already become a spectacle because my mother cannot control herself.”
Elena felt Nora look at her, not in judgment but in warning. There would be time later to understand the slap, to name it without excuses, to live with the fact that she had crossed the room and used her hand because words had failed her.
For now, Avery’s knees buckled.
Elena caught her.
Sloane moved at the same time, reaching the young woman’s other side.
“I have her,” Elena said.
Avery shook her head quickly. “I can stand.”
“You don’t need to.”
“I can.”
It mattered to her, so Elena let her try.
Avery steadied herself against the chair. The fabric beneath her palm had been crushed into a darkened patch. Her tears had stopped, but her face had gone pale.
Nora approached without the report.
“The morning room is empty,” she said. “I asked Miriam to bring water and ice.”
Avery looked toward the closed doors.
“I want to go home.”
Elena kept her voice low. “You can. Let me have someone check you first.”
“No doctor.”
“All right.”
“No ambulance.”
“I won’t call one unless you lose consciousness or tell me you need it.”
Avery nodded.
It was the kind of negotiation people made when fear had narrowed the world to one demand at a time.
Elena took her arm. Sloane moved back, uncertain whether she had the right to follow.
Avery looked at her.
For a moment, something passed between them—an apology neither owed the other, perhaps, or recognition that both had been standing inside a family’s version of itself and had suddenly seen the unfinished walls behind it.
Sloane lowered her hand.
“I’m sorry,” she said.
Avery looked away. “You didn’t do it.”
“No,” Sloane said. “I didn’t stop it either.”
Daniel gave a humorless breath.
“Can we please stop turning this into a moral tribunal?”
Sloane turned toward him.
The room had nearly emptied. Her parents waited near the top of the steps, Diana wearing the patient expression of a woman who had spent years translating her husband’s impatience into social grace.
Sloane removed her engagement ring.
She did not hand it to Daniel. She slipped it into the small interior pocket of her handbag.
Daniel stared at the place where it had been.
“What are you doing?”
“I’m leaving.”
“With your parents?”
“Yes.”
“You’re taking off the ring because my mother slapped me?”
Sloane’s eyes flickered toward Avery.
“No.”
Daniel followed her gaze and seemed genuinely unable to understand.
“Sloane.”
“I need to think.”
“About what?”
She gave him a tired look. “That question is part of it.”
Russell Mercer called his daughter’s name from the steps.
Sloane walked away.
Daniel stood in the emptied ballroom, his cheek red, his phone and the sealed report behind him.
Elena guided Avery toward the morning room.
May you like
Nora followed.
The morning room occupied the eastern side of Greyhaven and received sunlight long after the ballroom had fallen into shade. It was smaller, though only by the standards of a house designed in an era when families built rooms for waiting to enter other rooms. Pale bookshelves lined one wall. A faded portrait of Elena’s late husband, Thomas Vale, hung above the fireplace.
