Chương 3
“Peter had already done one of those ancestry kits,” he continued. “Years ago. He joked about how many cousins he found. I asked if he’d do a proper relationship test with me.”
“What did you tell him?”
“The truth.”
“And he agreed?”
“After telling me I was an idiot for twenty minutes.”
Rachel could hear Peter saying it. Charles’s younger brother was a retired orthopedic surgeon who wore running shoes with suits and possessed the Whitmore family gift for judgment without Eleanor’s elegance.
“What else did Peter say?”
Daniel looked toward the window.
“That my father asked him something once.”
Rachel waited.
“He asked Peter if he’d still look after me if something happened to him.”
“That sounds normal.”
“He asked if blood would matter.”
The room became very quiet.
Rachel looked toward Lily again.
Daniel rubbed his thumb over the folded edge of the laboratory report.
“Peter thought Dad was talking about money. Or maybe adoption. He didn’t ask.”
“When was that?”
“Before I started college.”
“And you’ve been carrying this around for six weeks.”
“Yes.”
“Why didn’t you tell me?”
He took longer to answer than she expected.
“Because I knew what you’d say.”
“What?”
“That Charles was still my father.”
“He was.”
“I know.”
“No, you know that intellectually.”
Daniel gave her a tired look.
“Thank you.”
“I’m not trying to win.”
“You knocked a glass out of my mother’s hand in front of four hundred people.”
“I was absolutely trying to win then.”
That surprised a laugh out of him.
It lasted less than a second.
Rachel hated that she was relieved to hear it.
Then she remembered Lily’s hand touching her bare hair.
“I need you not to hide things from me because you’re afraid I’ll say the kind thing.”
“I wasn’t afraid you’d say something kind.”
“What, then?”
“That you’d look at me and see that it didn’t matter.”
Rachel’s anger changed shape.
She still had it. She could feel it in her shoulders.
But now there was something under it.
Daniel looked down.
“It mattered to me,” he said. “And I hated that it mattered.”
Rachel sat beside him.
She did not take his hand.
Not yet.
The next morning, the broken tiara arrived in a white pastry box.
The hotel’s night manager had gathered every piece he could find after the ballroom cleared. Three loose pearls, two bent silver prongs, the snapped central comb, and one tiny diamond chip sat on folded linen where éclairs should have been.
Lily opened the box at breakfast.
Daniel reached for it.
“Maybe don’t—”
She moved it away from him.
“I want to see.”
Rachel buttered toast she had no intention of eating.
Lily examined the pieces.
“Can somebody fix it?”
“Probably,” Daniel said.
“Will Grandma fix it?”
Daniel’s jaw tightened.
Rachel answered before he could.
“We’ll decide what happens to it.”
Lily pushed the box toward the center of the table.
“I don’t want to wear it.”
“You don’t have to.”
“Ever.”
“You don’t have to.”
Lily nodded, satisfied by the permanence of this promise, then asked for strawberry jam.
Outside the suite, the problem had become larger.
The first video posted online was only eleven seconds long. It began after the tiara hit the floor. Eleanor’s face was clear. Rachel’s was visible from the side. Lily was mostly blocked by the dessert table.
There was no clean audio of Eleanor’s first sentence.
That did not stop people from filling it in.
By nine in the morning, three versions circulated.
Eleanor had insulted Lily.
Rachel had attacked Eleanor without provocation.
Daniel had revealed that Lily was not his biological child.
A society account posted that the fight involved “an explosive paternity scandal.”
A local business reporter noted that the Whitmore Foundation had scheduled its annual donor breakfast for the following day.
Someone freeze-framed Daniel holding the laboratory report.
Daniel turned off his phone.
It vibrated anyway because calls came through his watch.
Rachel took the watch from him.
“You’re confiscating my property?”
“Yes.”
“I’m thirty-eight.”
“Then this is especially embarrassing.”
She put it in the minibar beside two bottles of tonic water.
Daniel stared at the refrigerator.
“Why there?”
“Because you’ll have to decide whether you’re desperate enough to pay fourteen dollars for access.”
Lily laughed into her cereal.
For ten minutes they were almost a normal family eating breakfast in a hotel.
Then someone knocked.
Daniel’s general counsel was waiting outside with the foundation’s communications director and a woman Rachel had met twice whose official title involved reputation strategy.
Rachel did not let them in until Lily finished eating.
That irritated the communications director.
Rachel considered it a useful test of character.
They met in the adjoining sitting room while Lily watched a movie behind a closed bedroom door.
The communications director, Mark Eddison, opened a leather folder.
“We need a statement before noon.”
“No,” Daniel said.
Mark blinked.
“A holding statement.”
“No.”
“Daniel, there are already calls from national outlets.”
“Then hold them.”
“That is not what holding statement means.”
“I know what it means.”
The reputation strategist crossed one leg over the other.
“What precisely did Eleanor say to the child?”
Rachel looked at her.
“Her name is Lily.”
“Of course.”
“Then use it.”
A pause.
“What did Eleanor say to Lily?”
Rachel told her.
Nobody wrote for several seconds.
Mark’s expression changed first.
“Oh.”
Daniel leaned back.
“Yes.”
The strategist asked, “Was there physical contact?”
“She pulled a tiara out of Lily’s hair.”
“Was Lily injured?”
“She has marks on her scalp.”
Mark closed his folder.
“That changes this.”
Rachel almost asked what he thought a seven-year-old had been doing on the floor in the video.
Instead she said, “Nothing gets released with Lily’s name unless we approve it.”
“She is already identifiable to people who know the family.”
“That isn’t what I said.”
Daniel looked at Mark.
“She’s right.”
The strategist began carefully.
“There is another issue. The DNA document.”
May you like
“No,” Daniel said.
“If there is a question concerning Lily’s parentage—”
