Chương 1 - WATCH ME
My husband brought his mistress to our anniversary gala wearing my dead grandmother’s brooch.
Our twelve-year-old son saw it before I could look away.
“Mom, don’t cry,” Micah whispered.
His fingers tightened around mine.
“Watch me handle them.”
Across the Blackstone Hotel ballroom, Brett Holloway smiled beneath the chandeliers with Sierra Vaughn on his arm.
Four hundred people had come to celebrate ten years of Holloway House Hospitality.
Seven restaurants across Chicago.
Ten years of work.
And a program calling my husband “the singular vision” behind all of it.
Apparently, singular meant he had forgotten the woman who cooked beside him when we couldn’t afford another employee.
I sat in a black satin gown, watching his hand settle against Sierra’s back.
She was twenty-eight.
I was thirty-nine.
He had hired her eighteen months earlier to manage our brand.
Now she wore a red dress and the gold wheat brooch he had taken from me three weeks ago.
“The clasp is loose,” he’d said.
“Let me get it fixed.”
I had thanked him.
My grandmother, Opal Finch, wore that pin every Sunday.
One wheat grain near the top was bent because I had bitten it when I was seven, testing something I’d heard about real gold.
Grandma never repaired it.
“Some things ought to keep their stories,” she’d told me.
Now Sierra was wearing ours.
Brett reached our table.
“Audrey,” he said, as though we’d run into each other at the grocery store.
I looked at the brooch.
“Take it off.”
Sierra touched it.
“Excuse me?”
“It belongs to me.”
Brett’s smile tightened.
“Not here.”
“Then you should have thought about that before walking in.”
A server stopped behind him with a tray of champagne.
Brett leaned closer.
“We’ll discuss your behavior tomorrow.”
Micah pushed back his chair.
“Her behavior?”
“Sit down, son.”
“You gave away Great-Grandma’s pin.”
“Micah.”
That warning tone had always worked on him.
Tonight, my son stayed standing.
“You said tonight was about telling our family’s story.”
“It is.”
“Then tell it right.”
Micah picked up the small microphone waiting on our table.
The event planner had asked him to introduce the anniversary video after dinner.
He pressed the button.
“Hi,” he said, his voice carrying through the ballroom.
“I’m Micah Holloway.”
Brett reached for the microphone.
Micah stepped behind my chair.
“My dad says he built this company from nothing.”
The room went quiet.
Micah looked toward the stage.
“But I found the picture of what ‘nothing’ actually looked like.”
May you like
The giant screen lit up.
And Brett stopped smiling.
