“Sebastian suspects,” Edna said. “There’s a difference. Suspecting leaves room for the version where it might have been something colder — more calculated, more self-serving. I want him to know the truth of it before Nolan sits down at this table.” She looked at me. “Nolan is not a man who explains himself easily. He will try and he may not find the words. I want someone else in that room who already understands the shape of it.”
I looked at her.
At Edna Calloway — the woman who had sat in the third row at my wedding in a steel blue dress and applauded for exactly four seconds. Who had assessed me in her dining room and in my mother’s garden and had arrived, somewhere in the last three weeks, at something that wasn’t quite warm but was considerably more honest than what she’d started wit
