The Whitmore Group spring reception was held at the Meridian Club on the forty-second floor of a glass tower on Park Avenue, where the city spread itself out below like something that had been arranged specifically to impress.
It usually worked.
I had attended this reception three times before in my first life. The first time I had been nineteen and overwhelmed and had spent most of the evening trying to look like I belonged. The second time I had been assigned to stay close to Margaret and smile at the right moments and say nothing of substance to anyone. The third time I had spent the entire evening watching Adrian move through a room of powerful people with the fluid ease of someone who had been trained for exactly this since childhood, and I had felt, beneath all the other things I w
