Chapter 5: The Grand Aster
The Grand Aster ballroom held four hundred people and was designed to make all of them feel simultaneously important and observed.
Crystal overhead.
White flowers on every surface.
A string quartet near the east entrance playing something that required no attention and received none.
Julian had chosen it for the announcement.
Of course he had.
He understood rooms like this — how they amplified status, how they made the right entrance feel like a coronation.
He had not considered that they worked the same way for everyone.
We arrived at eight forty-seven.
My father walked ahead.
Two of his people flanked us at a distance that was close enough to be clear and far enough to be tasteful.
Maya held my hand.
She was wearing a dark blue dress that Harrison's assistant had produced from somewhere in the previous two hours, and she had decided at the last moment that she wanted her hair down, and so it was.
The room noticed my father first.
It always did.
Edmund Blackwood did not enter spaces — he occupied them, quietly, the way a barometric shift occupies a room before a storm.
Conversations paused.
Heads turned.
The quartet continued playing.
Then people saw me.
I watched the calculation happen in real time across a dozen faces.
Eleanor Vance.
Eleanor Blackwood.
The woman Julian had dismissed this afternoon, walking into the most important room of his year on the arm of the man whose family controlled more capital than the Vance Group's entire valuation.
A woman near the bar said something to her companion.
Her companion looked at me and went very still.
Julian was at the far end of the room near the host's platform.
He had his back to the entrance.
Genevieve was beside him in a white gown, her hand on his arm, already performing the role of the woman he intended to announce tonight.
Nathaniel was at table four, exactly where Harrison had said.
He saw me before Julian did.
His glass stopped halfway to his mouth.
I did not look at him.
Not yet.
"There's Grandpa's friend," Maya said, pointing at someone near the center of the room.
It was Reginald Holt.
He was watching us approach with the careful expression of a man rapidly revising a position he had held for years.
My father steered slightly in his direction.
"Reginald," he said.
"Edmund." Holt's eyes moved to me.
"Eleanor.
I didn't know you'd be attending."
"She goes where she chooses," my father said pleasantly.
"She always has.
We simply forgot to remind people of that."
Holt looked at Maya.
Maya looked back at him with complete indifference and then looked at the dessert table.
"Can I go see the cake?" she asked me.
"Stay where I can see you."
She went.
Holt watched her go.
"Julian told the board she'd left the city," Holt said quietly.
"Julian," my father said, "has told the board a number of things this week that will require correction."
Holt's jaw tightened.
"I received a call from Prescott—"
"I know about the call," my father said.
"I also know you haven't responded.
That was wise, Reginald.
I'd encourage you to remain in that position for the next thirty minutes."
Holt looked at me again.
This time it was different.
Not the look-through.
The look-at.
"You're moving tonight," he said.
"We're already moving," I said.
Across the room, Julian finally turned.
He saw my father first.
The confidence on his face shifted — not collapsed, not yet, but shifted, the way a man's expression shifts when he sees weather he didn't forecast.
Then he saw me.
Then he looked down and saw Maya at the dessert table, carefully examining a strawberry tart.
His face went through four things in two seconds.
I watched all of them.
Genevieve followed his gaze.
Her hand tightened on his arm.
"Julian," she said quietly.
May you like
"Don't."
He was already walking toward me.
