YARA Beau and I haven’t spoken about the drawer since that night.
Not once, not even in passing.
He’s been perfectly normal at breakfast, perfectly warm when he kissed my cheek this morning, and that’s somehow worse than if he’d said something.
It means we’ve both decided to bury it, and I’ve gotten good enough at burying things in this house that it barely even shows on my face anymore.
I don’t have time to think about it today anyway.
Nola’s charity luncheon takes over the whole ground floor by ten in the morning, and by noon the house has stopped being a house at all and become something closer to a stage.
Round tables dot the back lawn under white awnings, each one dressed in linen so pale it looks lit from underneath.
The good silver came out of the vault this morning.
Nola spent an hour deciding between two nearly identical flower arrangements before the caterers even arrived, and I watched her make that decision with the same gravity most people reserve for actual emergencies.
She’s magnificent at this.
I’ll give her that, freely, without any of the bitterness that usually comes with giving Nola credit.
She moves through the gathering crowd like water finding the shape of a container, greeting the Pemberton women by name, asking after somebody’s gout, complimenting a hat that doesn’t deserve it, and every single person she touches walks away feeling like the most important guest at the party.
It’s a kind of magic, watching her work a room.
I just never get to see it turned toward me.
Yasmin stands at her side through most of it, golden in a pale yellow dress that catches the light every time she moves, and Nola keeps her there the way you’d keep a lamp lit in a dark room, close enough that the glow reaches everyone nearby.
“Yasmin, darling, come say hello to Mrs.
Ashford.” “Yasmin, tell them about the auction committee.” Every introduction folds Yasmin further into the center of things, and I watch it happen from a few feet away, close enough to be present, far enough to not quite be included.
Yasmin plays her part beautifully.
She laughs at exactly the right moment when Mrs.
Pemberton tells a joke that isn’t funny, rests her hand on Mrs.
Ashford’s arm like they’ve known each other for years instead of minutes, tilts her head to catch the light just as someone raises a camera.
It looks effortless.
I know better.
I’ve watched her rehearse smaller versions of this same performance across a breakfast table.
Nola isn’t unkind to me today.
She just doesn’t think of me the same way, not in a room full of people whose opinions matter to her, and the difference has never been as visible as it is standing here in the sun.
“Yara, sweetheart,” Nola says, catching my eye across the lawn, and for one unguarded second I think she’s about to call me over the way she’s called Yasmin over a dozen times already.
“Would you go check with the caterers?
I think the second course is running behind.” It isn’t a question.
I’ve been at enough of these luncheons to know the difference between Nola asking and Nola directing, and this is the second one, delivered with a smile so smooth it could pass for a favor.
“Of course,” I say, because what else is there to say, and I go.
The kitchen is its own kind of chaos, staff moving fast around each other in a rhythm they’ve clearly done a hundred times, and the head caterer assures me, a little breathless, that the second course is exactly on schedule, that Mrs.
St.
Claire needn’t worry.
I believe him.
I think Nola knew that too.
By the time I make my way back out to the lawn, the luncheon has reached its loudest, most crowded hour, champagne glasses catching the light, laughter rising and falling in waves across the tables.
I find a spot near the edge, close enough to be seen doing my duty, far enough to breathe.
That’s where I hear it.
Mrs.
Delacroix, seventy if she’s a day, powdered and perfumed and holding court at the table nearest me, leans toward Nola with the particular delight of a woman who thinks she’s paying a compliment.
“I was just telling Cordelia,” she says, loud enough to carry, the way old women who’ve never once been told to lower their voices always are, “how remarkable it is, the two of them.
Twins, and you’d never know it to look.
Yasmin’s the very picture of you, Nola, always has been.” She turns, searching the crowd, finds me standing near the edge of the tables.
“But Yara, now.
Yara could be a different family entirely.” Yasmin doesn’t freeze the way Nola does.
She goes very still for half a second, a stillness with nothing awkward in it, controlled as a held breath, and then she laughs, bright and easy, and touches Mrs.
Delacroix’s sleeve.
“Isn’t that funny, everyone always says that.” Her eyes find mine for just a moment while she says it.
There’s nothing readable in them at all, and that’s exactly what unsettles me.
She says it lightly.
She means nothing terrible by it, I don’t think, just an old woman’s careless observation dressed up as a compliment to somebody’s genes.
But the words land in the middle of the party like a dropped glass, and for one full second, nothing moves.
I watch Nola’s smile freeze on her face, not fall, not falter exactly, just stop, mid-motion, like a photograph of a smile instead of the real thing.
I watch Beau, three tables over, go pale, actually pale, the color draining out of him so fast I see it happen in real time, his hand going still around the stem of his glass.
Nobody else at that table seems to notice.
Mrs.
Ashford is already moving on to some other observation, and the woman beside her is laughing at something else entirely, and the party keeps humming along exactly the way it did a second ago, oblivious.
My champagne glass has gone warm and sweating in my hand.
The sun feels too bright all of a sudden, too loud somehow, the way light gets when your pulse is climbing in your throat.
Beau’s knuckles are white around the stem of his own glass, and Nola’s smile is still fixed in that frozen half second, and the party just keeps moving around the two of them like water around a stone.
But I heard it.
And I saw both their faces.
Comment it and let me know.