Juno nearly cried over FaceTime while Tessa got ready.
The Plaza ballroom was exactly as merciless as Tessa expected—photographers, old money, sharp eyes, women who could assess another woman’s entire social position with one glance at her shoes.
Rhett was already there on a platform, talking to men in suits. He saw her from across the room and gave her a discreet two-finger wave meant for no one else.
Then Cordelia appeared.
Blonde in a red dress, expensive and surgical in her beauty, moving through the ballroom as though it had always belonged to her. She approached Rhett with practiced familiarity, kissed the air near both sides of his mouth, laughed at something he said without smiling, and reminded Tessa instantly why women like that were dangerous. Not because they were dramatic, but because they knew exactly how to stay polished while doing damage.
Tessa went to the ladies’ room to breathe.
Cordelia followed.
In the mirror-lined quiet of that marble room, with two socialites pretending not to listen, Cordelia offered a warning wrapped in velvet.
Rhett always picked a pretty one before coming back to her, she said. It had happened before. Tessa should not get hurt assuming this time was different.
Tessa closed her lipstick calmly, looked at Cordelia through the mirror, and answered with a warning of her own.
She knew what Cordelia had done on the day of his mother’s funeral.
She had the article saved.
If she were Cordelia, she would stay away.
That hit.
Tessa saw it in the way Cordelia’s face changed by degrees—the chin first, then the mouth, then the eyes.
When Tessa walked back into the ballroom, her spine was rigid with fury.
Rhett saw immediately that something had happened. He came to her fast, took her hand, and asked what Cordelia had done.
“Not now,” Tessa said.
He did not let go.
Instead he led her straight to Henry Whitaker from the Post and told the press exactly who she was.
Not privately. Not carefully. Publicly.
His girlfriend.
The photos were instant.
The anger arrived later, in the car.
He took her to his penthouse on Central Park West, a prewar building facing Strawberry Fields, the sort of place where doormen recognized women from photographs before the women themselves knew the photographs existed. The elevator opened directly into a glass-walled living room high above the park. Tessa kicked off her heels, crossed the cold floor barefoot, and turned to face the man who had just changed her life without asking permission.
She told him she wanted the whole truth.
Not the press version. Not Sullivan’s version. His.
If he did not tell it now, she was leaving and remaining in his life only as a newspaper item.
For once, Rhett did not try to manage the room.
He set down the whiskey bottle without pouring. Took off his jacket. Sat across from her. And told the truth.
Cordelia Vance had been his fiancée for two years. Their families knew each other. The engagement had been the expected future. His mother liked her. He liked her enough.
Then his mother got sick with pancreatic cancer three months before the wedding. She lived six months. Died on a Tuesday on the Upper East Side with her hand in his.
Wake Wednesday.
Burial Thursday.
Cordelia attended both.
Then, that same Thursday afternoon, after the burial and after everyone left, Rhett went back to the apartment that had been theirs. He went upstairs to change out of his black suit, opened the bedroom door, and found Cordelia in bed with his best friend—the man who had been set to stand beside him at the wedding.
He did not shout.
Did not hit anyone.
Did not even make a scene.
He told them to leave in fifteen minutes, went downstairs, and sat in an armchair until he heard the elevator doors close behind both of them.
He admitted the only reason he had not done more was that he had buried his mother that morning and had nothing left in him for another collapse.
Sullivan knew only because he saw them leaving the building.
After that, Rhett said, he spent three years staging fake relationships. Nothing real. Nothing lasting more than six weeks. Enough public dinners and photographs to keep the society columns from circling the same wound. Aunt Odette believed he would return to Cordelia eventually. Cordelia believed it too, for her own reasons.
And the women on Tessa’s spreadsheet?
He kissed two.
