Chapter 2 - The DoorsBy the time I walked back out of the restroom, the reception had drifted into its post-toast lull — guests refilling drinks, the band taking a break, my mother, Constance, holding court near the cake table in a burgundy gown that had cost, I happened to know, more than four months of my old rent.

Nobody noticed me at first. That, more than anything, told me everything I needed to know about how the previous fifteen minutes had already been absorbed into the evening — a joke told, a laugh had, a daughter momentarily inconvenienced, and then the party simply continued, the way it always had, around whatever had just happened to me.

Then the glass entrance doors at the far end of the ballroom opened.

Rhys walked in wearing the charcoal suit he'd worn to our courthouse wedding, because I think some part of him understood, even before I explained anything over the phone, that this was going to be the second time that suit mattered. He is not a small man, and he does not walk into rooms quietly, not because he tries to command attention but because thirty-four years of being exactly, unapologetically himself has given him a kind of gravity that most people notice whether they want to or not.

My father saw him three seconds after I did. I watched it happen — watched Victor's eyes travel from the stranger in the doorway to me, standing at the edge of the ballroom in a dry dress that clearly hadn't been packed as an afterthought, and watched something behind his face begin, very slowly, to rearrange itself.

"Evelyn." Rhys said my name the way he always does, like it's the best word he knows, and crossed the room in a handful of long strides, entirely indifferent to the four hundred strangers watching him do it. He took my face in both hands, kissed my forehead, and said, quiet enough that it was just for me, "Tell me what he did."

"He pushed me into the fountain."

Something shifted in Rhys's jaw. He didn't raise his voice. He turned instead, slowly, toward my father, who was still holding the microphone like a man who'd forgotten it was in his hand.

"You're Victor," Rhys said. Not a question.

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"And you are?" My father's voice had the particular, brittle confidence of a man realizing, in real time, that he does not yet understand what's happening, but is determined not to look like he doesn't.

"Rhys Calloway," he said. "Evelyn's husband."