The Dinner
The car arrived at seven fifteen Sunday evening. I was ready at seven ten. Navy dress, hair up, the small pearl earrings my mother had given me at twenty-one that I wore when I needed to feel like myself. I stood at my window for a moment and watched the car idle at the kerb below and thought about eighteen days and one Saturday phone call and a man who walked through Kensington because it was the only time the phone stopped. Then I went downstairs. The venue was a private dining room in St. James’s — smaller than the previous functions, more concentrated. Twenty guests. The full Alderton board, Cavendish, three lawyers, two institutional investors who’d backed the deal from the beginning. No Dominic Hale. No Marcus Webb. Just the people who’d been there from the start, gathered to clo
- Writer
