Chapter 1
“Now ask her permission to stay.”
Delphine stared at me.
Then at Sabina.
My chair sat beneath the maid instead of my fiancée, and that offended Delphine more than the silence of sixty guests.
“Alden.”
“No.”
I kept my voice low.
“You wanted hierarchy.”
I glanced toward Sabina.
“Here it is.”
Delphine’s face hardened.
“You cannot be serious.”
Sabina still held the napkin against the cream on her cheek. Her other hand rested flat against her skirt as though she were fighting the instinct to stand.
I looked at her.
“Stay seated.”
She swallowed.
“Yes, sir.”
Delphine laughed.
“You’re humiliating me over a servant.”
Sabina’s eyes changed.
Not fear this time.
Anger.
She looked directly at Delphine.
Then at me.
“She wants me gone.”
The room became still again.
“Why?”
Sabina hesitated.
Delphine spoke first.
“She’s incompetent.”
Sabina shook her head.
“No.”
Her voice strengthened.
“Because I keep opening the doors she tells me to keep closed.”
I studied her.
“What doors?”
“Your study.”
Delphine went pale.
Interesting.
Sabina continued.
“Not literally, sir.”
She looked toward the guests.
“People.”
Now I understood less.
Which meant I listened harder.
“When you travel, Miss Sedgewick tells staff certain guests aren’t allowed to reach you anymore. She says you refused them.”
I turned slowly toward Delphine.
“How many?”
Sabina named three.
Anthony Vale.
Peter Loring.
Michael Crane.
All long-standing Hartwell associates.
All three had become strangely distant over the past four months.
I had assumed pride.
Maybe they had assumed rejection.
Sabina continued.
“I heard Mr. Loring ask twice to speak with you. She told him you had no interest.”
I never received either request.
Delphine stood straighter.
“A wife manages a household.”
“You are not my wife.”
That landed.
Then Sabina said the sentence that changed the entire evening.
“She told us that after the wedding, nobody in this house would reach you unless they went through her first.”
The cake was no longer the scandal.
The chair was no longer the scandal.
May you like
My fiancée had been building a gate around me.
And Sabina had apparently become the servant who refused to close it.
