But Vanessa had been drinking the old habits all evening, and old habits are more intoxicating than champagne. She still believed humiliation was a tool only she could use. She still believed the room was hers.
She grabbed the plate of leftovers and shoved it at me again.
“You know what I actually think? I think poor Nora Bell gave herself a fancy title and came all the way here because she still needs this room to notice her.”
The crowd held its breath.
I let the plate fall.
It hit the ballroom floor with a wet, flat sound.
Then I lifted my phone and pressed one button.
Across the ballroom, the reunion projector flickered on.
Vanessa’s face appeared on the screen.
Not tonight’s face — a face from four months earlier, captured by security camera in a private office. Vanessa seated beside Grant at a conference table, both of them relaxed, champagne already open.
On the screen, Grant’s recorded voice: “The tenants won’t fight back. They never do.”
Vanessa lifted her flute in the footage. Her smile was easy, comfortable.
“Then bill the city twice,” she said on the screen. “By the time anyone notices, we’ll own half the block.”
The ballroom went the kind of silent where you can hear ice settling in glasses.
Vanessa turned toward the screen very slowly.
Grant’s voice came out low and hoarse. “What did you do?”
I looked at him. “What you should have done. Kept copies.”
Vanessa lunged for my phone.
I stepped sideways. She clipped the edge of a table in her heels and sent three champagne glasses to the floor in a cascade of breaking crystal.
“Turn it off!”
“No.”
Grant grabbed her arm. “Vanessa, stop.”
She slapped him.
The sound crossed the entire ballroom.
Someone made a sharp sound in the crowd.
“You said this was buried!” she said to him, loudly, with half the room recording it.
I tilted my head slightly. “Thank you.”
Her eyes went wide the moment she understood what she had just said. In front of our entire graduating class. In front of two local journalists who had responded to an anonymous tip about the reunion’s special guests. In front of the state housing investigator who had been standing near the bar in a navy suit for the past forty minutes.
I had invited him as my plus-one.
He stepped forward, already displaying his credentials. “Mr. and Mrs. Vale, I’ll need you both to come with me.”
Vanessa backed away. “No — this is a reunion. This is just a party—”
“It was,” I said.
