"Your father." Vivian's smile was thin enough to cut. "Or not, as the entire internet now informs me. Do you know what the Ashford Foundation board asked me this morning, Clara? They asked whether our name had been used to launder a fraud. Fraud. In Charleston, that word does not wash off."
"I am not a fraud." Her voice shook, and she hated it. "My name is Clara Bennett. It's on my birth certificate, my degrees, my—"
"Your birth certificate," Vivian said, opening the folder, "is precisely the problem, isn't it? Because according to your own mother's keepsake, it is a work of fiction. Now." She folded her hands. "Here is what will happen. You will give Celeste the ring today. You will sign a short statement saying the engagement has been ended by mutual agreement, owing to the discovery of previously unknown information about your parentage. You will not mention Thomas Wren, the fire, or this family. In return, we will not pursue the question of what your mother, or Henry Bennett, knew, and when."
"Henry is a retired judge," Clara said, stunned. "You're threatening to accuse him of falsifying a birth record."
"I am offering him the mercy of silence. Take it home to him. He'll understand the arithmetic. He always did."
The publicist wrote something down. Clara looked at the empty chair where Julian should have been and understood, with a clarity that felt like cold water, that he had been told about this meeting, and had chosen his morning accordingly.
"Where is Julian?" she asked.
"My son is devastated," Vivian said. "He is also, for the first time in this affair, being sensible. He is letting the family protect what can still be protected."
"And what about me?" The question came out smaller than she wanted. "What can still be protected for me?"
"That, my dear," Vivian said, "is a question for the Bennetts. Whoever they turn out to be."
Clara walked out of Ashford House with the ring still on her finger, because she had refused, in the end, to hand three carats of Ashford history to an assistant in a dining room. She would give it to Julian himself, or she would not give it at all. On the steps her phone lit up with a new alert, a photograph of herself leaving, taken from across the street, already posted.
RUNNING FROM THE ASHFORDS? the caption asked.
She stood in the Charleston sun, in a borrowed dress, and did not run. She walked, one block and then another, all the way back to Priya's, while strangers decided who she was in real time, and the locket at her throat ticked against her heartbeat like a second, smaller, broken heart.
Chapter 7: The Wedding Is Off
Vivian Ashford did not wait for Clara's statement. At four o'clock that afternoon, the Ashford family released their own, and they released it everywhere at once — to the Post and Courier, to two television stations, and, most efficiently of all, to the Charleston social accounts that had posted the engagement photographs less than a day before.
"The Ashford family announces, with regret, that the engagement between Mr Julian Ashford and Miss Clara Bennett has been cancelled," Clara read aloud in Priya's living room, because Priya said if she read it silently she would only read it ten more times. "In light of unexpected information concerning Miss Bennett's parentage, both families agree that it would be inappropriate to proceed. The Ashfords wish Miss Bennett well and request privacy at this difficult time."
"Both families agree," Priya said. "That's a lie with good posture."
"Unexpected information," Clara said. "That's me. I'm unexpected information."
At six, he finally texted. Not called. Texted.
I am so sorry. Mother thought it best to move quickly. Please understand this is not what I wanted. J.
"Not what I wanted," Priya said. "The passive voice of cowards. Priya Shah, exhibit A."
"I should call him."
"You should throw that phone into the Ashley River. But yes. Call him. Get the ending in his own voice. You deserve at least the voice."