“You’re not really supposed to be over here yet, D’Amico,” Wyatt said amiably, in greeting. “They’ll make an announcement for dinner.”
Allie gave Madison a jerky hug, her elbows hitting the soft parts of Madison’s torso.
“When did you get here?”
“Ages ago,” Madison lied.
“Your whole family?” Zo? said this without moving any part of her face but her mouth.
“Yes,” Madison said. Allie let her gaze flit from Zo? to Madison with tangible unease.
Wyatt turned his back on the party and showed Madison the inside pocket of his jacket. He had a flask tucked against the patterned fabric of the lining, which matched his vest.
“You want?”
Chip was studying the crowd with effort, clearly seeking an excuse to walk away.
“I’m good, thanks,” she told Wyatt.
“You guys both look so pretty,” Allie blurted out. “Amanda, I love your dress! I can’t believe you’re here, I thought your mom hated these things. My mom always says your mom is way too smart for the rest of us.”
“Well, ladies,” Wyatt said, and Madison was actually impressed by the smoothness of his intervention. “No one seems very excited about my flask! Levins, I remember you knocking ’em back like a champion at Halloween. Come on. Do a shot with me.”
Amanda ignored him. Chip still hadn’t looked at Madison. As she watched him, she caught sight of her again, the blond woman from outside.
Too late, she felt Zo? turn to follow her gaze.
“Oh, right. That’s the woman your dad fired, isn’t it?”
The words were still in the air, ready to be ignored by all six of them, when Zo? turned to Amanda.
“Do you think that’s her?” she said. “Madison, she told you how she saw your dad in the city with some woman, right? She told us about it at Halloween. God, Amanda, you were so hammered, do you even remember any of this?”
Then, without the announcement Wyatt had promised, the adults had begun to move. The crowd came in a mass across the wide lawn, dozens of women picking their way across the grass in their stiletto heels, balanced unsteadily on their husbands, who always seemed to move a few beats faster. Madison looked for her parents and didn’t see them.
“I have to go,” she said, but Chip was already leaving. He didn’t turn back, but Wyatt did. He slid his right arm around Madison’s waist, his fingers fumbling at her hip.
“My parents bought a few,” Zo? was whispering to Chip. “They auctioned off all of it, my mother had a field day. Her mother collected so much amazing stuff.”
Madison wanted to follow them, to grab Zo? by the roots of her fake blond hair and force her to say that again, say it louder, hand her the deejay’s microphone and have her say it up on the dais for everyone to hear as the party sat down to dinner. But Wyatt’s hands were still at Madison’s waist. Her dress was cut on the bias, and all she could think was that his fingers would leave the fabric crinkled, that it would be obvious someone had grabbed her dress with his sweaty hand.
“Don’t mind Abbott,” he said. “You know what he’s like, you know he’s always going to be looking for someone who’s on his level. Who wants to do the things he wants to do.”
She blinked at him for a moment, unseeing, reluctant to understand. Wyatt pulled back from her, his brow furrowed with malice or concern, or both.
“Look,” he said, “it’s none of my business. I just wanted you to know that I know he was a jerk, that’s all. He can be a jerk, right? And you shouldn’t feel like it’s because of anything else, like you’re too damaged for him right now or whatever. That wasn’t it.”
His hands were on her again.
“Excuse me?”
“I’m just saying,” Wyatt said. “You got good reviews. If you ever want to, like, move on to the grown-up stuff, I’d be down.”
He contorted his face, his mouth closed, his tongue pushing lewdly against the inside of one cheek. His hands were still on Madison’s hips, and she reared back to put her own hands to his shoulders. She was ready to shove him, hard. She wanted to see him flat on his ass, on the ground below where she stood.
But Amanda moved in, put one hand over Wyatt’s, squeezed his knuckles.
“Not a good idea,” she said. “When you sober up tomorrow, I think you’ll agree with me.”
“Fuck off, Levins,” Wyatt said, cheerful and unruffled. He turned and began to thread his way through the dinner tables, hands in his pockets.
“By the time he gets to his mother, what do you want to bet he’s not ‘totally wasted’ anymore?” Amanda said.
“What?” Madison said, and Amanda’s smirk faltered.
“Look,” she said. “Obviously I never meant to say anything to Zo? about it, I mean that’s obvious, right? I just didn’t know if I should—I didn’t even see anything. I just saw him in the street with that woman. That’s it.”
Most people had filtered toward the tent, for dinner, but there were stragglers enough still to keep the bars mobbed. The waiters with their silver trays of untouched food were filing back into the house, the party’s staging area, to get ready for the next part of the job.
“It was that blond woman?” Madison said. “The one who’s here? She used to work for him. You saw them together and you just . . . decided not to tell me?”
“Madison, come on,” Amanda said again. “What do I know about any of it? It was probably nothing.”
“Please don’t talk to me,” Madison said. “You should go find your dad. Find your own table.”
MINA AND ISABEL WERE SEATED, waiting for the others. Mina tucked her evening bag into her lap, and Tom appeared at her elbow with a tumbler in his hand. Her champagne was nowhere in sight.
A uniformed staff member of some kind, a middle-aged Hispanic woman who avoided eye contact with anyone else at the table, brought the boys to their seats, presumably at Isabel’s request. Madison came next, arriving in a flurry—playing with her hair, kissing the boys, making sure they were both situated in the grown-up chairs and could reach their forks and knives, their water glasses. She looked up at Mina, expressionless, and then looked down at her lap. Mina could see that she was taking that moment to draw herself in, to keep the face expressionless. When she looked up again, though, her eyes fixed on something over Mina’s shoulder, back toward the house.
Whatever it was, it was gone by the time Mina craned her neck.
“Madison?” she said. “Everything all right?”
Tom settled himself heavily in his chair.
“Where is he,” he muttered. He touched Mina’s hand and then looked at her intently in a way she could not interpret.
“Isabel,” he said, without looking away from Mina. “Jim is here, too.”
Isabel held herself erect, waiting for him to say more.
“McGinniss?”
Tom nodded, sucking his ice.
“Where’s Bob?”