The first thing that happened when I reached the doors was that Cora caught my arm.
She had to push through two rows of guests to do it. Her face was white. "Lizzie. Stop. Please."
"No."
"I'm your friend."
"You are not." I turned to face her. "You have been in the room every time they made the decision to lie to me. You held my hand at my mother's funeral and you knew. You have spent seven years deciding what I could handle. You are not my friend. You were the keeper of my cage."
She let go. She didn't say anything else. She stood in the middle of the aisle of the Ashford ballroom with two hundred people watching and I saw her face break, not into anger, into the thing she had been holding back, and for one second I almost stopped. But I had promised myself something on the pier in th
