I laughed once.
It escaped before I could stop it.
“My attorneys haven’t received anything.”
“You’ll receive it tomorrow.”
Tomorrow.
Apparently my marriage had become something that could be delivered by courier.
Shelby reached across the table.
“We never wanted to hurt you.”
I stared at her manicured fingers.
Those fingers had held mine at my mother’s funeral.
Those fingers had poured wine while I cried.
Those fingers had scrolled through photographs on my phone when I showed her the gold earring I had found beneath Preston’s passenger seat.
“Vivienne,” she had told me then, “grief is making you suspicious.”
Now I looked at the diamond on those same fingers.
“How long?”
Shelby glanced at Preston.
He answered.
“Eight months.”
My chest tightened.
Eight months.
My mother had been dead for eight months.
“When I found the earring,” I asked, “were you already sleeping together?”
Shelby’s expression hardened.
“This isn’t the place.”
That nearly made me laugh.
We were sitting inside the hotel where she planned to marry my husband in six weeks while florists adjusted orchids around us.
But apparently this wasn’t the place.
Preston sighed.
“Our marriage was over long before Shelby.”
“Interesting.”
“What?”
“Two months ago you posted a photograph of us at the Harrington Foundation gala.”
His eyes shifted.
I remembered the caption.
Still choosing you. Always.
Twenty thousand people had liked it.
Including Shelby.
I picked up my champagne.
Took one slow sip.
Then smiled.
Shelby visibly relaxed.
That was her first mistake.
“Of course I’ll come.”
Her lips parted.
“You will?”
“I’ll do better.”
I placed the glass down.
“I’ll give a speech.”
Preston’s eyes narrowed.
“What kind of speech?”
I smiled.
“An evidence speech.”
Shelby laughed.
Preston didn’t.
Because Preston knew something Shelby had apparently forgotten.
I was my mother’s daughter.
And my mother had taught me one rule about betrayal.
Never react before you understand what the other person thinks you don’t know.
At that moment, I knew almost nothing.
By midnight, everything changed.
I called Elias Ward from the back seat of my car.
Elias had handled corporate security for my father’s company for fifteen years.
He was sixty-two, former military intelligence, and possessed the unnerving ability to remain completely silent until other people filled the silence for him.
“I need you to check something,” I said.
“Quietly?”
“Very.”
Manhattan blurred beyond the tinted windows.
“Find out where Preston was the night my mother died.”
There was a pause.
“Why?”
“Because Shelby said something tonight that made me remember an old lie.”
“What lie?”
“Preston told me he had a client emergency downtown.”
“And Shelby?”
“Migraine.”
