“Evelyn?” someone said, uncertainly.
It occurred to me she was having a stroke. I looked around frantically, trying to find the doctor in the house. I didn’t even have my phone. It was still in the van because the keys had taken up every ounce of space in my tiny clutch purse.
I urged the lawyer next to me, “I think someone should call 911.”
She tried to speak. Nothing came out. Her knees buckled.
Everything broke loose at once—voices rose, chairs scraped, people surged forward.
“Give her space!”
“Get a doctor!”
The anesthesiologist appeared, dropping to his knees beside Evelyn, who was lying very still on the stone terrace. Her body was crumpled in an odd position, a thin white line coming out of the corner of her mouth. Her eyes are open, which normally would seem like a great sign of consciousness.
But Evelyn looked…dead.
I scanned the scene, my brain clicking into place whether I wanted it to or not.
The fallen cup. The crushed mint. And the straw.
It was lying just a few inches from her hand. Something about it wasn’t right. Not bent exactly—just… off. Like it didn’t sit the way it should.
The doctor stepped on it as he shifted Evelyn fully onto her back, tilting her head back. For a second it looked like he would do mouth-to-mouth but at the last second he hesitated.
He pulled out his phone and then gestured to the nearest person to him.
Unfortunately, that happened to be Taylor McIntosh, who was three mint juleps into the gala. I didn’t think he was going to be of any help whatsoever so I pushed my way forward, through the crowd.
“Excuse me, excuse me.”
I was too late.
Taylor, in his effort to bend down to discuss whatever request the doctor had, lost his center of gravity. He pitched forward, stumbled, and fell.
Right onto Evelyn Carrington.
Four
An expletive rang through the air. It took me a second to realize it was me who’d blurted it out.
As Taylor toppled onto a much smaller Evelyn everybody moved at once.
"Get him off her!" the anesthesiologist barked, and two men I didn't know hauled Taylor backward by the armpits.
He came up sputtering, bourbon-soaked and mortified, smoothing his hair back and eyeing the prone and very still Evelyn with horror.
"I tripped," he said, to no one, to everyone. "I didn't—I wasn't trying to?—"
"It’s okay, Taylor. We know it was an accident. Sit down," I told him, steering him by the elbow toward one of the wrought iron chairs a few feet away. He sat. Hard. He looked queasy.
I knew the feeling. A quick glance back at Evelyn made my stomach flip. It didn’t look good over there.
Crowded around Evelyn in a loose semi-circle were a dozen attendees, equal parts concern and morbid curiosity. Somewhere behind me a woman was already narrating the scene into her phone, low and breathless, and I made a mental note to find her later and confiscate that footage through sheer force of will, because if this went viral before the family had even been notified I was not going to be okay with that.
The anesthesiologist had Evelyn on her back, two fingers pressed to her throat. Her ice-blue gown had ridden up around her calves in a way that felt wrong to see, too undignified for a woman who probably hadn't been photographed at an unflattering angle since the Reagan administration.
"Pulse is thready," he said, mostly to himself. "Someone call it in again, tell them to step on it."
