Part 3: The Little Prince Problem

The Whitmores announced Sabrina’s pregnancy at church.

Not formally.

That would have been too honest.

They did it the Boston way, with murmurs, glances, and one carefully staged moment after Sunday service beneath the stained-glass windows of St. Bartholomew’s Episcopal.

I wore black.

Not mourning black.

Power black.

A tailored wool coat, pearl earrings that had belonged to my mother, and red lipstick sharp enough to draw blood from a room.

Lily slept in a cream cashmere wrap against my chest.

Grant stood beside me with a face like marble.

He had not spoken to me since he found Vivian Cross’s business card on my nightstand.

I had left it there on purpose.

Cecelia greeted parishioners near the aisle like a queen receiving tribute.

Sabrina stood at her side in pale blue again, one hand resting on the smallest possible swell beneath her dress.

Blue had become her entire personality.

People noticed.

People whispered.

I let them.

Rumors are only dangerous when you run from them.

Grant’s sister, Margot, approached me first.

She was forty, divorced, and had survived the Whitmore family by becoming meaner than anyone expected.

She looked at Lily and softened.

“She’s beautiful,” Margot said.

“She is.”

Margot glanced toward Sabrina.

“Mother has lost her mind.”

“Has she?”

“Don’t do that elegant ice-queen thing with me.”

I almost smiled.

Margot had never liked me, which made her honesty more reliable than kindness from anyone else in that family.

“She thinks Sabrina is having the next Whitmore heir,” Margot said.

“I gathered.”

“Grant told Mother the baby is his.”

I looked at the altar.

“And do you believe him?”

Margot was silent.

I turned.

She was watching Sabrina with narrowed eyes.

“What do you know?” I asked.

Margot looked back at me.

“I know Sabrina dated Bennett Caldwell last year.”

The name landed softly.

Too softly.

Bennett Caldwell was Grant’s best friend from Yale, a venture capitalist with a family house in Newport and a drug problem everyone called exhaustion.

He had been at our wedding.

May you like

He had toasted Grant with tears in his eyes.

He had danced with Sabrina at the Whitmore Foundation gala three months before my due date.

I remembered because Grant had watched them.

Not with jealousy.

With calculation.

“When?” I asked.

Margot adjusted her gloves.

“On and off until the summer.”

Sabrina was twenty-two weeks pregnant.

Summer mattered.

I felt the first clean edge of the twist before I could see the whole blade.