The smile froze on my face. I tried to ignore him. “How are you healing up?”
“I am fine.”
“Did you have a natural birth?” Juliette drained her wine. “All my births were natural. No epidural, no gas, no nothing. Anything less just isn’t childbirth, am I right, Susan? Oh, sorry. You wouldn’t know.”
“I had gas for the pain,” Ming whispered. “So much pain. And then an episiotomy, as the baby’s head was too large.”
“I got the doctor to put in an extra stitch.” Montgomery winked down the table. “The husband stitch. Best invention since breast implants.” He threw his head back and laughed like a donkey.
I laughed along, louder than everyone else. “How embarrassing for you, Monty. Imagine telling the whole table that you have a tiny penis!”
Delia spat out her wine. The Saxby twins burst into hysterical giggles. Montgomery went purple and mouthedlike a goldfish for thirty seconds. “I don’t— I have— My penis is perfectly proportioned, thank you very much.”
“Well, whip it out. Let’s take a look.”
He reared back, horrified.
“We need to know if you need surgery, Monty,” I said patiently. “I mean, we all know you made your wives get breast implants.”
“That’s different!”
“Is it?” I took a leisurely sip of wine.
Out of the corner of my eye, I noticed Donovan suddenly stiffen. He was still watching me, but his eyes flicked left, out the window, just for a second. In the gaps of silence between the Saxby sisters’ giggles, I thought I heard a reedy, high-pitched cry coming from outside. It sounded like a bird shriek. Or… a child’s scream.
Donovan rose, unfolding his massive frame from the table as elegantly as a panther getting up to stretch. He tossed his napkin on the table. “Excuse me for a moment.” He met my eyes, a silent order.Stay here.
I nodded, and he strode out of the room.
The second he was gone, Juliette leaned over the table. “Where did you find him, Sue?”
“He found me, actually.” I took another small sip of wine. “But it’s none of your business, Jules.”
Her eyes narrowed. “Come on, now. This can’t be a real date. Someone like him would never go for someone like you. You got lucky with Vincent because you trapped him while you were young and already high-up on the corporate ladder. Now you’re old and poor, and, from what I hear, you’re living in a shoebox and working at some shitty call center.”
I shook my head, exasperated. “How is this polite dinner conversation? Seriously, Juliette, in what universe do you think it is okay to talk to someone like this?”
She sniffed and refilled her wine glass. “I’m just being honest. Honesty is virtue, Sue. The truth is important. That’s the problem with most people these days.” She put on a baby voice. “They’re always wowwied about hurting their poor widdle feewings.” She snorted. “It’s bred a generation of weaklings who can’t handle the truth.”
“Honesty without compassion is just cruelty,” I told her. “And we all know that with you, Juliette, the cruelty is the point.”
“You can’t talk.” She snorted. “You just literally dogwalked Monty. He’s not going to be able to open his mouth for fear of being humiliated for the rest of the night.”
I took a sip of my wine. “He was being a misogynist. I just flipped the script on him, that’s all. He learned something today.”
“And I’m just being honest! It’s avirtue,” she said, tossing her ponytail fussily. “I want you to tell me the truth.”
“You don’t want the truth. You just like to hurt people.”
“Bullshit. I just can’t stand fake people.”
“Oh, really?” I let my eyes drift to my right, where her best friend Dan Raine, with his fake tan, was tossing his fake hair, and smiling with almost all of his fake teeth, dazzling the Saxby sisters with a fake story about his vacation with an A-list celebrity.
Gladioli walked back to the table to clear the main course plates, paused, and rolled her eyes. All the plates were stacked around Donovan’s spot. All of them were empty. Somehow he’d managed to steal everyone’s lasagna and eat it without anyone noticing. Muttering under her breath, Gladioli removed the empty plates, and returned with three enormous plates of tiramisu.
It smelled divine. One plate went in front of the professor.She studied me carefully, then placed the other two in Donovan’s empty spot.
Juliette scowled at me, ignoring Gladioli completely. “Look, we all know that your little ‘date’ is not what it looks like. If he is a real prince?—”
