When it came time for Corinne’s toast, she was two glasses of red wine deep and having trouble picking up her fork. Finally she managed to clink it against the side of her glass. Gabriel stood up, ostensibly to pull out her chair, but he ended up holding her elbows as she found her feet.
“You’re drunk,” he whispered in her ear.
“Only a little. It’s when I do my best work,” she said.
He shook his head and sat back down.
“Thank you all for coming tonight,” Corinne said, keeping both hands on the table edge to steady herself. “As most of you know, I’ve only just come back from school, and I’m afraid there’s not enough time between studies to write a meaningful speech.”
She chanced a look at Phillip and Angela, who were holding hands again. Their smiles were bland and practiced. Corinne was surprised that Phillip hadn’t interrupted yet to say something patronizing.
“Instead,” she continued, “I’d like to offer a poem I came across recently, by Lewis Carroll. I thought of my brother and soon-to-be sister when I read it.”
She conjured a sweet smile for the bride and groom. She’d actually memorized the poem years ago, and her brother had been the last person on her mind.
“A boat, beneath a sunny sky
Lingering onward dreamily
In an evening of July . . .”
Corinne kept a gentle cadence as she quoted. Despite its cheery beginning and lyrical rhythm, the poem wasn’t a romantic one. It was about golden memories and the inevitability of their fading.
Under her left hand, Corinne brushed her thumb across the brass of her grandfather’s watch, using the familiarity of it to center herself. If her grandfather had been here, he would be the one making the speech, telling some anecdote about his travels, sneaking a wink at Corinne. Maybe after it was all over, she would join him in the quiet warmth of his study and he would tell her about Alice the acrobat or Alice the fortune-teller.
Corinne had to blink away the memories to get through the last lines of the poem. She hadn’t meant to drink quite so much before dinner, but between the relatives and her mother and the iron in Gabriel’s damn gun, itching at the edge of her sanity, she didn’t see how she’d had much choice.
She lifted her glass with her right hand, letting her focus fall away from the room, into the abstract. It was a delicate art, finding the balance between the minds of the people she was trying to deceive and the deception itself, which she had to draw from her own mind. She’d spent years perfecting it. Trying and failing. There weren’t very many wordsmiths who could conjure a tiny, detailed, lifelike illusion—one that would appear in the eyes of a room full of people. It was the movement that was the hardest. The trick was giving them the first glimpse and letting their minds fill in the details. Once they thought they saw something, then it might as well be real.
Everyone raised their glasses. Corinne brought hers to her lips. Then a gray, twittering rat ran down the length of the table, inciting uproar as it went, before finally leaping into the bride’s lap. She thrashed and screamed, falling out of her chair and kicking Phillip in the chest multiple times as he dove to help her.
Ignoring the panic, Corinne calmly set down her glass and leaned across the table to catch her father’s wide eyes.
“I don’t feel well,” she told him. “Gabriel is going to take me home. Good night.”
She and Gabriel slipped out right as the serving staff arrived with brooms and mops to go in search of the culprit. They had to wait in the lobby for the footman to fetch their coats, and then wait again outside for the valet to bring the car around. Corinne hopped impatiently from one foot to the other. Her feet had gone numb in her shoes, which was preferable to the aching of before. The snow hadn’t started again, but the night was still bitter with cold.
The Ford was just pulling around the corner when Phillip came outside. “Corinne, wait,” he said. “Where are you going?”
He hadn’t put on his coat and stood with his hands crammed into his jacket pockets. Corinne remembered when he had been a gangly teenager, with pimples and hunched shoulders. He used to stand the exact same way, even though military school was supposed to train that sort of posture out of its students.
“Gabriel’s taking me home,” she said. “I’m sick.”
She didn’t bother pretending to be sick. They had already escaped. It wasn’t like he could drag her back in.
“You were just going to leave?” he asked. “You’ve been avoiding me all night.”
The valet had opened her door. Gabriel was hovering uncertainly beside her, and she waved for him to get into the car. Phillip wore an expression that Corinne hadn’t seen on him before. He looked wounded.
“I told you, I’m sick,” she said. She didn’t know what else he wanted from her. She had been on her best behavior all night—the rat incident aside, but he didn’t know that was her.
“I told Mother not to invite Hamish.”
“I don’t give a fig about Hamish,” she said. “Go back to your party. I’ll see you at the wedding.”
She climbed into the car, thinking only afterward that maybe she should have hugged him or congratulated him or something. Then the valet shut the door, Gabriel kicked the car into gear, and she’d lost her chance.