Callaway Briggs, 41, self-made billionaire, though self-made in his case meant starting from upper middle class and multiplying aggressively.
He’d built Briggs Development Group from a single commercial property on the north side into a portfolio that now stretched from Chicago to Toronto.
Forbes had profiled him twice. Had He was known for being sharp, private, and according to the profile, notoriously difficult to impress.
He sat at the head table now, broad-shouldered in a dark navy suit, one arm resting on the table with the kind of relaxed authority that didn’t need to perform itself.
His face was composed, pleasant, the face of accustomed to being watched. He smiled when someone spoke to him and laughed at the right moments, but Imani noticed in the brief glances she allowed herself that the smile never quite reached his eyes.
Next to him, Celestine Harrow. If Callaway was composed, Celestine was curated. She wore a champagne-colored dress that moved like water when she shifted in her seat, and her blonde hair was arranged in a style that looked effortless, and had certainly taken hours.
Her laugh was musical and perfectly timed. She touched Callaway’s arm at regular intervals, a practiced gesture, tender on the surface.
She was the kind of beautiful that made other women check their reflections and find them wanting.
Imani didn’t find her wanting. Imani found her familiar in the way that certain kinds of danger are familiar once you’ve learned to recognize them.
She couldn’t explain it yet. It was just a feeling, the slight wrongness of something perfectly arranged.
She moved her cart to the service station near the east side of the garden and began collecting used glasses from a tray table nearby.
The afternoon sun pressed warm against the back of her neck. Her yellow cleaning gloves were already faintly damp inside.
She worked methodically, efficient, thinking about Reuben’s dialysis appointment on Thursday and whether the hospital’s billing department had processed the latest payment extension her mother had requested.
She was thinking about that, about Reuben, about the form her mother had faxed three times and hadn’t received confirmation on, when she looked up and saw Celestine’s hand move.
It was quick, a casual gesture, the kind that would disappear inside the visual noise of a crowded party.
Celestine had turned slightly away from Callaway, leaning toward the woman on her left, as if sharing a private joke, her right hand moving in a fluid arc beneath the table level.
A small movement. Her fingers opened and closed over Callaway’s plate. And then her hand was back in her lap, and she was laughing at something the woman had said, and nothing had changed.
Except Imani had seen it. She stood very still for a moment, cart handle in both hands, her brain running the image back, fingers opening over the plate, something falling, fingers closing again.
She couldn’t see what it was. She couldn’t be certain. >> [clears throat] >> She was a temp cleaner at a party full of 200 wealthy people, and the woman she just watched was the host’s fiance.
Eyes down, pace steady, be invisible. Patrice’s voice in her head. And then Callaway Briggs reached for his fork.
He picked it up with the unhurried confidence of a man at his own table, spearing a piece of the salmon entree that had been plated with architectural precision.
He lifted it. The fork rose in an easy arc toward his mouth, and the room moved around him the way rooms always moved around men like him, orbiting, accommodating, unconscious.
Imani’s legs moved before her brain finished the argument. She crossed the distance between the service station and the head table in eight steps.
She would count them later, in the middle of the night, trying to understand what had happened.
And her arm shot forward, gloved hand gripping the edge of the table, and she said it louder than she meant to.
Don’t eat that, sir. The string quartet didn’t stop immediately. It took two or three seconds for the music to dissolve into confused silence as the players realized something had shifted in the atmosphere of the party.
But the immediate radius, the head table, the four tables nearest to it, the cluster of guests standing with champagne flutes near the fountain, went quiet all at once, the way crowds go quiet when they sense that something real has just happened inside the performance.
