Investor Night

The Ledger had run its story on the Saturday as promised, though a softer version than the forty-eight hours had threatened, and Hattie had read it once, standing in her own kitchen with the kettle boiling over behind her, and felt the specific relief of watching a thing she’d braced for turn out survivable. The corridor was in it. The wine dinner was in it, described with just enough accuracy to prove somebody had actually been in that dining room. Her own name sat next to Thea Whitlock’s for two paragraphs, framed as an awkward entanglement rather than a betrayal, because Thea herself, asked for comment through a lawyer neither of them had needed to hire, had said only that her speechwriter had told her everything personally, weeks before publication, and that she had complete confidence in the wedding proceeding as planned.

It should have ended there. Instead it had…