“Beatrice,” she said, rising halfway from her chair. “This is completely inappropriate.”
I looked at her.
“No,” I said. “What happened in my bedroom was inappropriate.”
Michael stood so abruptly that his chair scraped across the floor.
“Mom?”
I reached up and removed the wig.
The room inhaled.
Cool air touched my scalp. The raw skin beneath the chandeliers looked almost pink against the silver stubble that remained along my temples. Someone gasped near the cake table. Someone else whispered, “Oh my God.”
Michael stared at me as though he were seeing a wound he had caused with his own hands.
Sabrina remained standing.
“You’re making a scene over a joke,” she said.
“A joke requires consent.”
“It was not serious.”
“You entered my bedroom while I was unconscious.”
Her eyes flicked toward the cameras.
“You don’t know that.”
I unfolded the paper on the podium.
The note lay beneath my palm.
“Do you recognize this?”
Sabrina did not answer.
The tiny heart seemed almost cheerful beneath the sentence.
Michael looked from the note to her face.
“Sabrina,” he said quietly. “What is that?”
She turned toward him with a practiced expression of injured disbelief.
“She’s trying to destroy us.”
“No,” I said. “I’m trying to stop you from destroying me.”
The room had become completely still. Even the servers had stopped moving.
I reached into my purse and placed my phone beside the note.
“I recorded a conversation we had before the speeches.”
Sabrina’s eyes widened.
