The Crowe family lunch had a table long enough to land a plane on.
I walked in behind Lachlan in borrowed shoes, and Seraphine Loft met me at the door like she owned the carpet.
Seraphine: Darcy. Sweetheart. There's a place for you. I made sure of it personally.
She said it warmly enough that half the room smiled along with her.
The place she'd made for me was a small table by the kitchen door, with the servers.
Seraphine: Family sits at the big table. Staff sit here. It's how the house runs.
Seraphine: Don't sulk. You're the one who fucked her way up the stairs. I'm just being tidy.
A waiter pulled my chair out and gave me a look that was almost kind, which was worse.
I could have made a scene. I've made a lot of scenes this week.
But my father still had all his fingers, and that was the only reason I was in this room.
Lachlan came in off the terrace with his father and stopped looking at anything but the kitchen door.
That was my first clue that Seraphine had planned this whole little lunch.
Alastair: Miss Kerr. I'm told you're carrying my grandchild.
Alastair: From over there you look like a temp who got lost.
He said it the way other men said good morning.
Seraphine: Father Crowe, be kind. She's delicate.
She said delicate like it was a diagnosis.
Then Lachlan set his glass down and walked the whole length of that room without a single word.
He took the back of my chair in one hand and dragged it, scraping, to the head of the table.
The scrape of that chair was the loudest thing in the room, and every face turned at once.
Lachlan: She sits here.
Seraphine: Darling. That's my chair.
Lachlan: Then find another one.
Somebody down the table choked on their wine and tried to turn it into a cough.
My face went hot. My whole chest went hot, and I hated that the heat felt like relief.
Nobody had ever moved furniture for me before.
Then he reached into his jacket and set a small box on the linen in front of me.
Lachlan: Open it.
Darcy: If this is a ring, I'm going to throw up on your mother's china.
It was a ring. Old gold, a flat green stone, and a band thin enough that it had been worn every day of somebody's life.
Lachlan: It was my mother's.
Seraphine: Lachlan. That is not funny.
Lachlan: I'm not laughing.
He slid it on himself, and it fit, and that was the part that got me.
A dead woman's ring, sized for me in advance. Somebody had measured me and never said a word.
His thumb stayed on my knuckle one second too long, and I felt it in places that had no business chiming in.
Lachlan: Now every person at this table knows exactly whose you are.
Darcy: Whose I am?
Lachlan: You want to have this fight in front of my father?
Darcy: I want to have it somewhere. Don't think I won't.
Seraphine: Enjoy the seat, Miss Kerr. Chairs get pulled out from under people all the time.
She said it sweet enough for the whole table to hear and stupid enough to be deniable.
I sat at Lachlan Crowe's right hand with a dead woman's ring cutting into my finger.
It was the safest I'd felt in a week, and I couldn't decide if that was a good thing or the worst thing yet.