Because we weren’t going to make you beg.
We were going to make you accountable, which is so much worse, and lasts so much longer, and no amount of money can make it stop.”
Then Noah turned to the room and said the thing that ended the Vance family’s world with total politeness:
“The gates will open in five minutes. I’d encourage everyone who isn’t a Vance to use them. Cars are being brought around. Drive safely.”
Fifty guests did not need to be told twice.
They set down their champagne — Clover’s silver dress forgotten, my humiliation forgotten, everything forgotten except self-preservation — and they filed out of that ballroom in a silence broken only by heels on marble.
By the time the room emptied, the only people left under the crystal chandelier were the Vances, the Sterlings, and me.
The powerful family, and the one they’d called nothing.
Wendy — who had laughed by the champagne tower, who had called me lucky — sank into a chair.
“Please,” she whispered.
There it was.
The word.
I hadn’t had to make anyone say it.
They got there all by themselves.
PART 4
The courtroom, eleven months later, was the largest in the county, and it was full.
The Vance case had become the biggest public-corruption trial the state had seen in a decade.
The hospital wing made national news — VANCE FAMILY SKIMMED CHILDREN’S UB HOSPITAL, one of Caleb’s three newspapers ran, and after that there was no ballroom large enough to hide in.
