Declan keeps me close but does not crowd. His hand finds my back when the crush is worst, leaves, returns. I like the way it feels and hate that I like it. When the quartet shifts into a waltz that has the thread of an old tune running under it, he looks at me with a question that is not a question, and I nod because some decisions are already made.
We dance once, slow. My cheek rests against his chest. His breath is even and warm. I feel how tightly he holds himself, how carefully he moves me, how he loosens only when the turn brings my face into the brief safety behind his shoulder. The room recedes. There is only silk and the clean scent at his throat and the faint, steady drum of his heart under my palm.
“Do you know,” he says after a while, voice low, “that I thought of this a hundred times when I could not sleep.”
“I assumed you were busy counting ships,” I say, and he huffs a laugh that stirs my hair.
“Ships and a woman who will not let me win,” he says. “I prefer the second. It is honest work.”
“Win what,” I ask, because I want to hear him say it.
“Time,” he answers. “A home that won’t spit me out. Your laugh, every morning.”
I do not answer. I let the dance be an answer. My chest tightens anyway.
We break for air and another round of handshakes. A city councilman introduces a man with a smile that never touches his eyes. A critic I once told to stop using the word “unctuous” asks whether the Hearth will add a tasting menu. “Only if you promise to actually taste it,” I tell him, and Declan smiles into his flute like a sinner in a pew.
In the corner, a buffet groans under the ambition of the catering committee. Oysters wearing minuscule capers. Tartare piped onto rye crisps with an herb so finely chopped it turns the oil green. Potato pavés stacked with chive creme and a flick of smoked trout roe like a punchline. I keep reaching for anything in a spoon because spoons slow you down and I need the night to last a fraction longer.
A trustee stops us with an introduction to a philanthropist with teeth like a weather report. “We’ve heard so much about your cooking,” she says, hand cool and dry. “And about your…story.”
“My story is mostly butter,” I say. “Sometimes salt.”
“Charming,” she says, which is the word you use when you do not approve. Declan shifts like he might plant himself between me and her shade, but I step forward, thank the trustee for his work on the school program, and slide us away with a smile sharp enough to slice citrus. He catches my eye as if to say he saw and he approves.
For a rare ten seconds the room gives us space. He draws me toward the edge of the floor, near the doors that open to a hallway lined with old Conservatory portraits, the kind where men hold violins like swords and women sit as if the chair is a throne. I am about to ask him whether he remembers the firstgala, the one with the Pol Roger and the bread and the feeling of something beginning, when I see her.
Siobhan stands near the champagne fountain, crimson dress that fits like it was sewn where she was standing. Her hair is pinned back tighter than she has ever pinned it, not a strand out of place. She holds a coupe in one hand and pretends to listen to a man whose name I could guess in three tries. She looks over, finds me, and smiles. It is a perfect smile. There is something brittle in it. Something sharp.
“Do you want me to move you?” Declan asks quietly. He has felt it in the air without turning.
“No,” I say. “She works for me.”
“Tonight she works for whoever paid for that dress,” he says, and I pinch his sleeve to stop the quip that is coming. He lets the joke die without protest. He is learning.
“Stay,” I tell him. “This is between women.”
He tips his head, conceding the point, and reroutes us so our path threads near the fountain. We pass within a yard. Siobhan’s eyes flick down my dress, up to my face, then past me to the man at my side. Her smile widens by a millimeter, and I hear the sound of a hinge somewhere inside it.
“Aoife,” she says brightly when we are close enough to make ignoring impossible. “You look very… culinary tonight.”
“I’m one garnish short of edible,” I say. “You clean up well.”
She lets her gaze rest on Declan as if tasting a word. “Mr. O’Connell.”
“Ms. Murphy,” he says with the kind of politeness that ends conversations rather than starting them.
“We should talk menus on Sunday,” I say, choosing my voice with care. “The venison needs a starch that isn’t lazy.”
“Of course,” she says and sips her champagne without swallowing. “I’ll bring notes.”
She turns before I can end it first. It feels like losing a small game. Declan’s hand on my back steadies me, and we circle away into the next round of donors and questions and speeches that take three minutes longer than anyone wants them to. I answer well enough, laugh where I mean it, stand where he needs me, and, for a moment when the quartet chooses a carol and smooths it into a waltz, I let myself picture a year from now where this is not a costume but a life we can step into without apology.
The speech ends. The room thins by a third. I excuse myself for the powder room, partly because I need lipstick and partly because I want thirty seconds to stand still. The hallway outside the ballroom is a miracle of old wood and high ceilings and security guards trying very hard to be decorative. Portraits of composers line the wall. Their eyes follow you and mine have no patience for it tonight.
The powder room is empty and smells like peonies. I blot, reapply, tell my pulse to behave, and step back into the corridor. The noise from the ballroom swells and then settles like a living thing. I walk toward the doors, slow enough to look like I am drifting, fast enough to look like I have somewhere to be.
He is waiting just inside, I know he is, because when I glanced back earlier the shadow at the corner was his. I am two steps from the door when a body slips into my path, fluid and deliberate.
