What Augusta Said

Augusta Whitlock received the news of her granddaughter's ordeal the way she received most difficult information: standing very straight, glass of champagne untouched in one hand, expression arranged into something between concern and control.

"She wasn't hurt," Augusta said, when Reid finished. It wasn't a question. "Then let's not turn my birthday into a police matter over a prank, Reid. Children play cruel games at parties. One of the young cousins, no doubt, showing off."

"She said a woman with white hair told her to wait. Told her you'd come find her."

For just a moment — the length of a held breath, no more — something moved across Augusta's face that Joanna, watching from six feet away with Priya's hand crushed in hers, would later describe to Reid as recognition, not surprise. As if Augusta had been waiting eleven years for a sentence exactly like that one, and now that it had arrived, some old, careful part of her was simply relieved the waiting was over.

"White hair," Augusta repeated. "Well. Half the women at this party qualify, darling, myself included."

"Mother."

"I don't know what you want me to say, Reid."

"I want you to tell me why a stranger would use your name to get a six-year-old to walk two hundred yards from a party and wait at a locked gate. That is not a prank. That is a message. And it was addressed to you."

Augusta set down the champagne glass, and her hand, Joanna noticed, was not quite steady doing it.

"You should take your family home," Augusta said, and there was something in her voice now that had never been there in nine years of Sunday dinners and Christmas mornings — something brittle, something close to fear. "I'll speak to you tomorrow. Not tonight. Not at my party, in front of forty guests."

"Someone chained your granddaughter to your gate, and you want to wait until tomorrow—"

"Reid." Just his name, but it carried the full weight of sixty-five years of being the only person in this family who had never once had to raise her voice to be obeyed. "Tomorrow."

She turned and walked back toward the lights and the quartet and the guests who had noticed nothing, leaving her son standing on the dark lawn with his wife and daughter, and for the first time in his life, Reid Whitlock found he did not trust his own mother's back as she walked away from him.

"She knows something," Joanna said quietly.

"She knows everything," Reid said. "I've just never seen her look scared before."