“It’s fine,” I said, and heard my own voice come out even and clear. “I’ll go.”
I turned my head just enough to look at my father. He wouldn’t meet my eyes. He looked past me, toward the ballroom doors, where glittering silver and navy decorations had already begun to spill out like a promise.
I could have asked why. I could have demanded it.
But betrayal doesn’t usually arrive without a long, paved road leading right up to it. This wasn’t a sudden cliff. It was the edge of something I’d been walking toward for years with my eyes half closed.
“My name is Rachel Parker,” I would tell people later, when they asked—because they would ask, eventually, when the rumor reached the edges of our carefully curated family image. “I’m thirty-five.”
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