Have it tested, please.” She paused. “That’s all I’m asking.” The security men reached her, hands on her arms firm and impersonal, already steering her back and away from the table.
Around them, the party had fractured into urgent whispers, guests leaning toward each other, champagne flutes suspended midair.
Callaway still hadn’t put the fork down. He set it on the edge of his plate with a quiet, deliberate click of silver against China.
His face had returned to neutral, sealed and unreadable. He looked at the plate for a moment.
Then he looked at Celestine. “It’s fine,” he said, though it wasn’t clear what he was calling fine.
“Let the party continue.” The security men kept moving Imani backward toward the estate’s side exit.
Behind her, she could hear Celestine’s laugh restart, bright and assured, reassuring the nearest guests that everything was all right, that the interruption was nothing, that the party was still the party.
The string quartet found its place again in the music and began to play. Imani let herself be walked through the side gate and into the service corridor that ran along the outer wall of the estate.
The heavy door clicked shut behind her. She stood in the shadow of the corridor, May’s sun cut into a narrow slice above her, and listened to the muffled sounds of the party resuming on the other side of the wall.
Her heart was running fast and loud. Her hands, still inside the yellow gloves, were shaking slightly.
She didn’t know if Callaway would cover the plate. She didn’t know if anything would come of it.
She didn’t know if what she’d seen was what she thought it was, or if she’d just destroyed her reputation in Chicago’s event services industry based on a half-second glimpse across a crowded garden.
What she knew was that she’d seen Celestine Harrow’s hand open over that plate. And she knew what her gut was telling her about what that meant.
One of the security men, younger with an apologetic set to his jaw, appeared beside her and cleared his throat.
“I need to collect your badge and your cart access pass,” he said. “You’re being released from today’s assignment.”
Imani pulled the badge from her apron and handed it over without a word. “Ms.
Harrow asked me to make sure you understood you’re not to return to any Briggs property,” he added.
He had the decency to sound uncomfortable about it. Imani nodded. She was already pulling out her phone to call Patrice and let her know before Patrice heard from someone else, already mentally calculating what this would do to her availability rating on the temp agency’s platform, already running the math on whether she could afford to lose this source of income given the Thursday dialysis appointment and the outstanding hospital bill and the 3-month-old crack in her building’s heating system that her landlord had promised to fix in February.
Then she heard it, muffled through the stone wall but clear enough, a single voice, Celestine’s voice, smooth and certain, carrying the confidence of someone who had already decided how this would end.
“Fire [snorts] her now and make sure she doesn’t get work in this city again.”
Imani stared at the wall. Then she put her phone in her pocket, squared her shoulders, and walked toward the service exit at the end of the corridor.
She had Reuben to think about. She had Thursday to think about. She had a feeling, quiet and stubborn, settled somewhere beneath the fear that this wasn’t over.
