“Here,” he said, continuing to smile that silly smile. “Take it.”
In truth, nothing about his expression was silly. Nothing about his expression was old-fashioned or harmless or the least bit charming. But I was twenty-three years old and sitting in a room full of people more important than me, and he was a donor at a church fundraiser. And I had absolutely no reason not to accept a small gold cherry.
I took it.
He smiled. Closed my fingers around it with both of his hands — a brief pressure, dry and warm — and stood and moved back into the room as smoothly as he'd arrived.
I sat with the charm in my closed fist, watching him go and felt, without being able to say why, like I'd just signed something.
Break their teeth, O God.
Do not ask me why — perhaps because I didn’t want to lose it, or maybe because Ididthink it cute — I found the clasp on the back of the cherry, a small loop, and pinned it to the strap of my dress and moved back into the party. A server refilled my glass. A woman from Baton Rouge, by the name of Eloise, came to me and we talked about the food bank. She asked me good questions and seemed genuinely interested in the answer — at least more so than the men I had passed some sentences back and forth with.Theyhad been spectacularly interested in the way the dress sat on my hips, or the way my breasts moved when I breathed.
But with Eloise it was different, and I started to think maybe I'd misread the room; maybe the unease was my own damage talking — maybe this was simply a party full of rich people and I was the one making it strange.
Then I felt Judah go still.
I hadn't been watching him. I'd been facing Eloise, half-listening to something about a levee preservation initiative. But I felt it — his eyes and then the sudden rigidity of his body.
I turned.
He was fifteen feet away, in conversation with one of the older men from before, and he was looking at me. Not at my face. At the charm on my dress strap.
His expression didn't change. That was the thing — nothing moved in it, not a muscle, and that was worse than if it had. The man beside him said something and Judah turned back to answer. His voice when it came out was exactly the same as it always was. Quiet and measured.
But his jaw had done something. Just for a second. Just long enough.
I turned back to Eloise and said something about the levee initiative that I immediately forgot because I was watching Judah and trying to figure out what had gone wrong.
The next hour had a quality I can only describe as weather. Something building in the room that had no visible source, pressure without an obvious front. Judah moved through it with his bourbon — his third, I'd been counting without meaning to — and spoke to every man in the room at least once, and each conversation was short and quiet and ended with the other man nodding in a way that wasn't quite agreement, more like acknowledgment. Like terms being confirmed.
Two more men approached me with small talk that felt like something else. I smiled and answered and kept my hands where they were and each time I looked across the room Judah was already looking back.
At nine-fifteen Darlene appeared at my elbow from nowhere.
“Time to go, sweetheart,” she said. Her voice was its usual self — warm, practical, no room for argument.
“The party isn't—”
“Your evening is.” She had my wrap already, draped over her arm, and her hand at my elbow was gentle and absolute. “Say goodnight to Eloise and come on.”
I said goodnight to Eloise. Let Darlene steer me toward the door. At the threshold I looked back once — I don't know why, some animal instinct — and found Judah across the room, watching me leave.
Then — I watched him cross the room over.
“Darlene.” He smiled at her, placing a hand on the small of my back. With the high-heel shoes on, we were almost the same height.
“I’ll see Ms. Evangeline out,” he said. His voice carried that same measured tone, but there was something underneath it now, a current I couldn’t quite identify.
Darlene hesitated, her fingers still gripping my wrap. “Pastor, I was just—”
“Thank you, Darlene.” The dismissal was gentle but final. “I need a word with Mercy before she goes.”
I watched Darlene’s face perform a complicated calculation, weighing obligations against instincts. She nodded finally, relinquishing my wrap to Judah’s waiting hand.
“I’ll bring the car around front,” she said, her eyes finding mine with a message I couldn’t decode.
When she was gone, Judah’s hand remained at the small of my back, a source of heat through the burgundy silk. He guided me not toward the door but down a darkened walkway away from the party’s murmur.
