The Bennetts
Monique didn’t flinch. She just smiled wider, her fingers brushing her napkin lightly.
But for everyone else, the tension spiked again, hot, brittle, suffocating. Lydia leaned slightly toward Ariana, her expression unreadable but alert. Mr. Bennett looked between his wife and Monique as if searching for a script he hadn’t been handed.
Ryan looked like he was standing at the very edge of his sanity.
This dinner, which had started with peace and celebration, was now crumbling in real time. He loved his daughter. He loved Rihanna more than anything else. And Rihanna, for all her five-year-old innocence, knew that her daddy loved her mother. She knew they were a family, the three of them. If Monique said one wrong thing, if she so much as claimed out loud that she was Ryan’s w
