A later message recovered by investigators confirmed why.
Thatcher and Claudine believed the gala would keep me occupied long enough for them to finish another step in their paperwork while I was away from the studio.
They had spent months using my routines against me.
My morning tea.
My trust in Claudine.
My habit of working late.
My certainty that Thatcher’s business advice was meant to help.
Now they were relying on one more predictable thing.
They assumed that if Bloom won an award, I would be standing under ballroom lights smiling for photographs while they moved the deal forward.
That part of the plan they had right.
I would be at the gala.
They were wrong about almost everything else.
The next twelve days were the longest days of my life.
Every morning, Thatcher kissed me goodbye.
Every day, Claudine spoke to me about clients.
Every night, I wondered how two people could know me so well and understand me so poorly.
Claudine knew how I designed.
Thatcher knew how I lived.
Neither seemed to understand what I would do once I stopped believing them.
Detective Bains eventually told me investigators expected to act around the gala.
She did not give me details.
Mr. Finch knew more than I did and enjoyed pretending otherwise.
“Can you at least tell me whether I’m going home with my husband that night?” I asked him.
“No.”
“You know.”
“I know many things.”
“You’re enjoying this.”
“Very little about this has been enjoyable.”
He was quiet for a second.
“But that question was.”
I invited Hannah to the gala.
She almost declined.
“I just told you what I saw,” she said.
“You stopped me from walking over to that bar.”
“I delayed you five minutes.”
“That was enough.”
She sighed.
“There better be decent wine.”
“There will be.”
Mr. Finch came too.
So did my two oldest clients and several members of my staff.
Detective Bains and another investigator were present in the hotel but not seated with me.
The Pinnacle acquisitions director came as part of the event’s business networking crowd.
Thatcher believed his presence was useful to the sale.
Claudine believed the same thing.
By then, I had learned that ignorance could sometimes be an advantage.
I arranged the centerpieces myself.
White ranunculus, dusty miller, and winter greenery.
Nothing theatrical.
Nothing so tall that guests could not see one another across the tables.
My mother always said centerpieces should know when they were not the most important thing in the room.
An hour before the gala, I stood in the hotel bathroom and put on her gold earrings.
Simple drops.
She wore them to graduations, weddings, funerals, and every meeting where she thought she might need courage.
I had inherited them after she died.
That night, I understood why she had kept them in the same velvet box as important papers.
Thatcher arrived at seven in the charcoal suit I had taken to the dry cleaner earlier that week.
I nearly hated myself for doing it.
Then I remembered that normalcy was part of what had gotten us this far.
He kissed my cheek.
“You look beautiful.”
“Thank you.”
“Nervous?”
“A little.”
He smiled.
“You’ll win.”
For three years, I had loved the confidence he seemed to have in me.
Now I wondered how much of it had been admiration and how much had been measurement.
Claudine arrived fifteen minutes later in a deep green dress.
She hugged me.
“Look at you.”
I hugged her back.
Her perfume was the same one she had worn at the Ballantyne.
My body remembered before my mind did.
I stepped away.
“You okay?” she asked.
“Just nerves.”
She squeezed my hand.
“You deserve tonight.”
There are sentences you remember because they are beautiful.
Others become obscene in hindsight.
You deserve tonight became the second kind.
The Pinnacle director arrived around seven-thirty.
Across the room, he shook Thatcher’s hand with the brief nod of two men who believed nobody was paying attention.
I was.
So was Detective Bains.
Mr. Finch arrived carrying a manila envelope.
He put one hand on my shoulder.
“Your mother would have hated these centerpieces.”
I stared at him.