Chapter One
"DO YOU KNOW WHAT Iadmire most about you, Ms. Tyndale? You're so brave."
Coming from anyone else, it might have been a compliment.
"Most mothers would rather stay home than attend an event like this in..." Amybeth Schnapp stirred the air with one diamond-heavy hand, as if the right word for Aislinn's dress could be summoned out of it if she stirred long enough. "...that. But not you. You wear it like you simply don't care what anyone thinks, and I find that so inspiring."
"Thank you," Aislinn Tyndale said warmly, choosing the one reply that would end the conversation soonest, and also the only one that was technically true. "It has pockets."
A titter went around the circle of silk-wrapped, champagne-armed mothers, and Amybeth's smile thinned the way it always did whenever Aislinn declined to supply her with tears. Aislinn excused herself before the woman could reload, and went to find her son.
The party had swallowed the grandest ballroom of the grandest hotel in the city and was still chewing. A chocolate fountain taller than most of the guests of honor burbled away near the terrace doors, a string quartet in white tie sawed earnestly through the theme song of a cartoon about racing snails, and in the center of everything, on its own velvet-roped pedestal, sat a six-tier birthday cake shaped like a Lamborghini, because Brooklyn Schnapp, the birthday boy himself, had reportedly wept until thebaker agreed to working headlights. There was an ice sculpture of the number eight. There were waiters carrying trays of tiny hamburgers that no child was tall enough to reach. Three hours in, and Aislinn had personally transported eleven beverages and zero tiny hamburgers, which felt like a pretty fair summary of her whole afternoon.
And at the far end of the gift table, seven years old and straight-backed in his thrift-store blazer, her son stood guard over their present.
It was a wooden chess set. They'd spent three evenings sanding and oiling it at their kitchen table until the wood turned glass-smooth under their palms, and Louis had carved a tiny crown into the white king's base himself. On the gift table, wedged between a tower of couture-wrapped boxes and something enormous from a toy atelier in Milan, their brown-paper parcel with its twine bow looked...well. It looked hand-wrapped.
"You don't have to smile at her, Mama," Louis said with terrible politeness, not looking at Amybeth at all, which somehow said more than any glare could.
"Smiling is free, my love." Aislinn smoothed his collar, which didn't need smoothing, because sometimes a mother's hands simply need somewhere safe to go. "It's the only thing in this hotel that is."
She hadn't wanted to come. She wanted that noted somewhere. Officially. In whatever book kept track of things mothers put up with. The invitation had come through the school itself, printed beneath the crest and the motto, with a line at the bottom explaining that attendance at classmates' milestone celebrations was strongly encouraged as an exercise in community, and everyone at that school understood that strongly encouragedwas simply Latin for required. So she'd juggled her weekend shift, and begged a favor she couldn't afford to owe, and here they were, exercising community.
She'd managed to laugh at exactly one part of it, at least. The dress code. Festive attire, the letter said, so she'd sat up past midnight sewing a satin ribbon to the waist of her one good dress and gone to bed feeling like Coco Chanel's scrappier cousin. Festive, it turned out, meant new couture. There was nothing she could do about that, but she could laugh at herself for it, and so she had, all the way up the hotel steps, until Louis was laughing too, and even the doorman cracked a real smile, like he meant it.
"Ms. Tyndale! Oh, good, you're not busy."
Amybeth had reappeared with an elderly guest in tow, and before Aislinn could finish turning around, Amybeth draped a floor-length fur stole across her arms like she'd been hired for the job.
"Grandmama needs this checked, and a lemonade brought up for her grandson. You don't mind, do you, darling?" Amybeth's rings caught against the fur as she arranged it higher, the better for it to cover Aislinn's ribbon. "You have such a natural gift for service."
"Smiling is free," Aislinn reminded herself under her breath, and decided the joke had gotten a lot less funny in the last ten minutes.
Somewhere behind them, one of the mothers whispered, audibly, in that special pitch people use when they want their whispers heard, "Is she staff?"
"She might as well be," Amybeth said, not whispering at all.
The stole was astonishingly heavy, and still warm from its owner, which was somehow worse.
Aislinn carried it anyway.
Any scene she made today would follow Louis into his classroom on Monday, and she refused to hand these people ammunition. Besides, somewhere in this ballroom was a thirsty little boy, and a thirsty child was a thirsty child, whoever his grandmother happened to be. And eight years of being everyone's easiest target had taught her one thing. You can't stop people from treating you like a coat rack. But you can decide, every single time, who you're going to be while they do it.
The stole and Aislinn got properly acquainted on the walk that followed. It was heavier than her son, haughtier than its owner, and somewhere past the second bank of elevators she gave up on resenting it and named it Gordon.
"Well, Gordon," she informed it out loud, because there was no one in the elevator to witness her losing her mind, "let's see what you're made of."
And if her eyes stung a little by the time they reached the cloakroom, well. That was strictly between her and Gordon.
Louis watched his mother disappear through the ballroom doors with a stranger's coat over her arms, and let his party smile fall off his face, since it had only ever been borrowed for the occasion.
He checked his watch.
2:51.
The watch was a scratched-up digital thing with a strap gone gray and worn, and it lost exactly one second a month, which Louis privately considered the only honest thing in this hotel besides his mother.
Nine minutes.
