Page 118 of Wreckage and Rain

"I have come to talk."

"About Sonny."

"About a number of things. Sonny is one of them."

"Colt has made his position quite clear. I assume yours aligns with his."

"My position aligns with mine, Vivienne. Colt and I happen to agree on most of it, but I haven't been speaking for him in any room for some time."

She watches me. Her mask is doing more work than it usually does. The corners of her mouth aren't as set as she would like them.

"Then please. Say what you came to say."

I let the silence sit for a moment. Vivienne has used silence as a weapon for as long as I have known her. I'm borrowing it now.

"I want to thank you," I say.

"Pardon?"

"For five years of teaching me how to do this. The smiles. The compliments with a blade folded inside. The seating charts. The careful arrangement of who sat where and who wasn't asked. I was an obvious target the day Colt brought me through your front door, and you have been training me, very patiently, every single Sunday dinner, in the precise art of being polite to a woman who is trying to ruin you. I want you to know that the training took. The student has surpassed the master. I want to be specific with you about that, because I don't want you to mistake what's about to happen for an accident."

She holds very still. The smile isn't moving.

"Summer."

"I'm not finished."

The smile flickers. She closes her mouth.

"You knew, Vivienne. You knew your husband hired a woman to break my marriage. You didn't know about the drugs. I will give you that. Colt thinks you didn't know about the drugs and I believe him because he knows you better than anyone alive. But you knew about Cheyenne. You knew about the dinners. You knew about the seating. You knew that your son was beingwalked, slowly, away from his wife, and you watched it happen the way you watch a hydrangea you decided was the wrong color for the bed. You let it happen because the wife was inconvenient, and the new arrangement would have made it easier for your husband to continue what he'd been doing with the company. The whole machine depended on a son who would sign whatever was put in front of him, and a son like that requires a wife who won't get in the way. I was in the way."

A muscle ticks in her jaw. I have never seen that on her face. The mask has a crack.

"You watched me at every dinner in this house for years. You watched me find my own name at the far end of your seating chart. You watched me stand at the end of your table while a woman my father-in-law was paying three hundred and forty thousand dollars a year sat in the chair next to my husband. And you said nothing. You served pecan-crusted trout and asked me how the writing was going and you said nothing. Not because you didn't see. Because you saw and you decided."

She opens her mouth.

"I haven't gotten to the part I want you to hear."

She closes it.

I let a beat go.

"Your son is going to be fine."

She blinks.

"He's in therapy. He has a company. He has friends who tell him the truth. He has my parents, who fed him supper and called him son. He has me, which I won't pretend is a small thing. He's going to be fine, Vivienne. Without you. Without your husband. Without the house that has been suffocating him since he was six years old. He's going to be fine because he finally walked out of this garden and didn't look back, and because the work he's doing is his own."

She's staring at me now. The mask has cracks in three places.

"And I want you to understand that you won't be beside him for any of it. You won't be in the room when he and I have a child. You won't be in there when we buy the first house that's actually ours. You won't be there when his name finally belongs to him instead of your husband. You will be in this garden. You will be in this house. You will be at a dinner table that has fewer people at it every year. You will be in cream silk and pearls, and you will be brave, Vivienne. You will be very, very brave. Because that's what the women in this family say to each other when they have nothing else left to offer."

Her hand goes to her throat. To the pearls. She has done that gesture, that exact gesture, at every dinner I have ever attended in this house. The pearl-touching gesture. What she does when she is about to say something elegantly devastating to someone who hasn't had time to brace.

"Summer."

I wait.