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He stops in front of me and takes the letter.
“Who is this?” another guy asks. Another one of the relatives. Younger than Henry, from the looks of it—maybe twenty-seven, whereas Henry is around thirty.
Henry doesn’t answer; he’s performing an intensive examination of the letter.
“It’s real,” I say.
He turns it over. Holds it up to the light. And suddenly I’m back there, sixteen years old, everyone acting like I’m the liar, trying to intimidate me. Challenging me on things no regular person would be challenged on.
“Oh, please,” I grab it from his hand. “You know it’s real, so don’t bother.”
“You know her, Henry?” the younger relative asks again.
“She was in Mom’s hospital room.” Henry eyes me. “Pretending to read the dog’s mind.”
Umm…what to say to that. It is definitely what I was doing. I shift Smuckers to the other arm. “The dog has a name,” I say. “It’s Smuckers.”
Henry gazes down at me imperiously. “And now she’s hoping for a payday. So, how long did you have your hooks into my mother?”
Sometimes a question is a question. Other times, a question is a finger, aggressively poking your chest.
That’s what this question is, a bullying finger jab. “I didn’t fool her or have hooks into her,” I explain. “I never expected anything from her. I took Smuckers out of kindness.”
The younger relative snorts, like I’m being ridiculous, but I keep on.
“Did she think I’m a dog whisperer? Yeah, even though I told her repeatedly I wasn’t. Excuse me if I tried to use it to help her now and then.”
“You mean help yourself,” says Henry’s younger but equally burnished relative. “If there are signs you manipulated her with your shady dog psychic act…” The relative frowns, like the implications are too troubling to name.
“What?” I say, heart racing madly. I don’t really want to know, but I learned with bullies that you have to pin them down. You can’t just be scared. “Or what?”
The Henry clone raises his brows, like, you’ll see.
I snort. “I thought so.”
Everybody’s looking at me, but it’s Henry’s gaze I feel, like a silken ribbon on my skin. I don’t dare look at him. He’s a raging inferno of assholishness and powersuitedness with a dash of hotness that makes him…uh.
I spot a tray of champagne flutes. I walk over and take a glass, just to do something.
Also, alcohol.
I concentrate on the holding of Smuckers and the sipping of champagne while I wait for whatever is supposed to happen to start happening.
Henry and his clan are all on the other side of the room, quietly affronted and maybe they really are eyeing the candlesticks. There are several large candlesticks, all of them good and hefty.
I was surprised Bernadette funded so much of the hospital, with her apartment being so shabby and all, surprised that she was a somebody from a long line of somebodies, the kind that show up on the society websites. I was actually surprised there were society websites at all, but maybe that’s not a shock since I’m allergic to rich personages of every stripe.
Carly was actually the one who ushered me into the world of society websites and Henry Locke soon after I came home from the hospice and uttered his name.
“Wait—the Henry Locke?” she said.
“There’s a the Henry Locke?”
“Uh!” Carly has about fifty varieties of Uh! This one I recognized as her can-you-be-more-clueless?-Obviously-NOT! variety of Uh. She fired up her phone and promptly handed it over, and I found myself staring at a smiling tuxedo-clad Henry with a beautiful, dark-haired woman on his arm, dressed in Givenchy.
“So, he’s supposed to be somebody?”
She fixed her most incredulous gaze on me. “Henry Locke? Playboy starchitect? Cock Worldwide?”
