Her fingers traced aimless circles around the rim of her wineglass.
The faint hum of crystal vibrating beneath her fingertip was swallowed whole by the noise of the banquet hall—but Selena heard it. She heard everything in this room, could separate every layer of sound with the precision of a scalpel. The outermost layer was the one the Anderson family had staged so meticulously: the clink of glasses, the warm bursts of laughter, the grand theater of host and guest performing mutual adoration. Beneath that ran a second layer—the unspoken chess match among the family heads, silent power plays traded through glances and pauses too deliberate to be casual. And deeper still, nested in the crevices between the toasting and the scheming, was the innermost layer of all: a single sentence, dipped
