. CHAPTER 1 — The Locket on the Marble Floor
The Belcourt ballroom had been designed to make ordinary people feel small.
Crystal chandeliers hung like frozen fireworks above the marble floor. White roses climbed the gold-trimmed columns. A string quartet played softly near the balcony while two hundred guests whispered behind champagne glasses, waiting for the bride to appear.
Clara Hale stood behind a velvet curtain, dressed in lace and silk, looking more like a painting than a woman. Everyone outside knew her as the perfect bride: heiress to the Hale Foundation, daughter of a dead philanthropist and a quiet billionaire father, future wife of Preston Westford, the son of one of the oldest families in Boston.
But under the veil, Clara’s fingers were cold.
She had never liked this wedding.
Not because of Preston. He was handsome, polite, and careful with his smile. Not because of the cameras waiting outside. She had grown up around cameras. It was something else—something in the way Preston’s mother, Vivian Westford, had looked at every servant in the room as if they were stains on the carpet.
“Smile,” Preston whispered, touching Clara’s elbow. “Today fixes everything.”
The word fixes made her stomach tighten.
Across the ballroom, a young waitress in a black uniform moved between tables with a silver tray. She was thin, pale, and no older than twenty-three. Her dark hair was pulled into a neat bun, but her eyes looked swollen, as if she had cried in a hallway before being ordered back to work.
Clara noticed her because the girl kept touching the necklace under her collar.
A round silver locket.
The same shape as the one Clara had kept hidden in her childhood jewelry box for nineteen years.
Before Clara could look closer, Vivian Westford swept into the ballroom in a champagne satin gown, smiling like a queen greeting people she secretly hated. She stopped beside the waitress, snapped her fingers, and demanded another glass. The girl turned too quickly. A drop of red fruit punch splashed onto Vivian’s dress.
The room froze.
Vivian stared down at the stain, then at the shaking waitress. Her smile disappeared.
“Watch where you’re going,” she hissed, loud enough for every rich guest to hear.
The waitress lowered her head. “I’m sorry, ma’am. I’ll clean it.”
Vivian grabbed the tray from her hands and let it crash to the floor.
May you like
Clara stepped out from behind the curtain.
That was when the locket slipped from the waitress’s collar, hit the marble, and rolled across the floor like a secret finally escaping.
