I turned toward Jack, needing confirmation, and discovered he was no longer standing nearby. The waitress appeared with his seltzer water and lime and I took it, replacing it with my empty wineglass, thanking her while looking over her shoulder to find out where Jack had gone. I spotted Thomas, talking with a group of people, but Jayne wasn’t with him.
The quartet stopped playing and Marc stepped up to a microphone and I noticed all the servers were now passing out flutes of champagne. “Excuse me, please—now’s the big moment,” Rebecca said as she walked past me to where Marc was standing. Camera flashes popped all around them like paparazzi, and I was left wondering if they were plants paid for by Marc and Rebecca. I certainly wouldn’t put it past them.
Someone touched my elbow and I turned to see Suzy Dorf, as diminutive as I remembered, holding a champagne flute. “You’re a hard person to reach,” she said, taking a sip from her glass.
“I’m very busy,” I said, remembering the reams of pink message slips Jolly Thompson had dutifully filled out despite the fact that she knew I threw them all away.
“Well, if you’d bother to return my calls, then you’d already know what the big announcement is.”
“I already know about the film—it was in the paper. But it’s not being filmed at our house—we haven’t agreed to that, nor would we ever.”
Her round brown eyes—looking remarkably like buttons—widened. “Really? Because your husband has. Surely you know that.”
Something that felt like a hot flame erupted from my core and shot up my throat to my head. I was pretty sure that was what being hit by a meteor would be like. “I’m sorry?”
Marc was tapping the mic, and Suzy indicated him with her chin. “Stick around—you’ll hear him make the announcement now.”
I thrust the glass of seltzer water at the reporter. “I’ve got to find Jack—there’s been some mistake. Excuse me, please.”
She grabbed onto my arm. “I saw him just a few minutes ago, heading back toward the kitchen.” She paused, as if debating whether she should say more, then decided not to.
I didn’t stop to pry out whatever it was she thought I should know, because whatever it was had to be the least of my worries. If Jack had actually signed that agreement, a blizzard was about to start in hell.
CHAPTER 29
I’d read accounts of soldiers shell-shocked after an explosion, suddenly deaf and blinded, stumbling forward with no idea of how they got where they were or where they were headed. I felt a little like that now, propelling myself with sheer instinct, looking for the door where the waiters were moving in and out and following them into the kitchen as if I were supposed to be there.
The food smells were stronger there, the noise louder and punctuated with orders being barked from one end of the white-tiled room to the other, the sharp clack of knives against cutting boards, the metallic clanking of silverware, and the ping of china plates being stacked. I was only vaguely aware of all this, a sound track to my own personal nightmare as I scoured the space for Jack. A female waiter—I recognized her as the one who’d brought the seltzer—stopped and stared at me for a long moment. Then, with lifted eyebrows and a jerk with her chin toward a door behind me, she allowed her empty tray to be filled with champagne flutes and exited the kitchen.
My first instinct was to follow her, even if it meant listening to Marc make his announcement. It would make a good excuse anyway as to why I hadn’t followed Jack into what appeared to be a large storage room. With a closed door. Behind which I could clearly hear a female voice. But I remembered what my mother had said about becoming the new and mature Mellie. The one who faces the truth instead of hiding from it, and asks questions no matter how unpleasant the answers might be. And believes jumping to conclusions shouldn’t be on my list of exercises. And I remembered what Jack had said about trust, and how our marriage was based on it. They were both right, of course. I was a forty-one-year-old married mother of three, and it was time to pull up my big-girl panties.
I could hear the faraway amplified voice of Marc Longo. “Jack Trenholm, related by marriage, has generously agreed to allow most of the filming for the movie to be made in his home on Tradd Street, which is where the story takes place.” I felt sick and betrayed, but still clung to a shred of hope that I had misunderstood, or that Jack had an explanation that would make it all better. That what my mother had told me about the importance of finding out the truth was true.