Chapter 12 — Setting the Table

POV: BEATRIX

Three days felt a lot shorter once I had to survive them.

Friday arrived quickly, as deadlines often do. Before the caterers finished setting up, I had already changed my outfit twice. 

I've reorganized my nerves over a dozen times already. 

The dress I finally picked wasn't even my first choice. I switched at the last minute to something with sleeves. 

Something that covered more. Old instinct. Don't give my mother anything new to comment on.

Around noon, Ivy took charge of the decorations. She rearranged a vase of white roses as if she were staging a hostage negotiation. 

I let her. Watching her work gave my hands something to do other than shake. 

The caterers moved around us as if we weren't there, setting silverware in perfect lines, and I envied how simple their job was tonight compared to mine.

Nikolai found me in the kitchen an hour before the first course was due. 

I had a legal pad covered in my own handwriting laid out across the counter. 

He raised an eyebrow.

"You're taking notes," he said.

"I'm briefing you." I turned the pad around so he could read it. 

"You said you wanted to know what you were inviting in. I'm not letting you walk in blind."

He pulled out a stool and sat down, arms crossed, giving me the same attention I imagined he gave a room full of lawyers.

"My mother will start with flattery," I said. 

"The house, your suit, whatever car dropped her off in. She'll compliment something specific enough to sound real.

Don't trust it. It's not warmth. It's information gathering."

"Noted."

"She'll ask about money too," I said, staring at my own handwriting instead of him. 

"Not directly. She'll mention the electric bill, or Serena's rent, or some emergency that always seems to show up at family dinners." 

She's done that my whole life. I used to hand over half my paycheck before I learned better."

His jaw tightened, just barely. "She won't be asking you for anything tonight."

I believed him. That was new too. Believing someone when they said they'd handle something.

"Around the second course, she'll switch gears. 

"Talk about how hard things have been. "How misunderstood she is. " How a mother only wants what's best, even when her kids won't see it. 

She might cry. She's good at crying on command. Don't let it move you."

"It won't." He said.

I wanted to believe that as much as he seemed to.

"And Serena." I paused on that one. Not because I didn't know exactly what she'd do. Just because saying it out loud made it feel more real. 

"She'll dress like she's the one being introduced tonight, not me. She'll laugh too hard at things that aren't funny. She'll find reasons to touch your arm, your shoulder, whatever's closest. 

It won't be subtle. Subtlety has never worked for her, so she doesn't bother.

"Has she ever actually gotten what she wanted, doing it that way?" Nikolai asked.

"Once or twice. With men who wanted an easy yes more than anything real." I looked at him. "You're not that."

"No," he agreed. "I'm not."

"What does subtle look like for her?" Nikolai asked.

"I honestly don't know. I've never seen it."

He sat with that for a moment, something unreadable in his eyes. Then he asked a question I wasn't prepared for.

"And what do you need from me while all this is happening?"

Nobody had ever asked me that before a family dinner. Not once in my whole life. 

I'd spent twenty-six years figuring out what my family needed and shrinking myself to fit around it. 

I opened my mouth twice before anything came out. I didn't have an answer ready for the question turned back around.

"Just don't leave me alone with any of them," I said, quieter than I intended. 

"That's it. Whatever happens, don't leave me alone in a room with one of them."

Something in his face turned serious. "You won't be."

Before I could think about it too hard, Ivy came running into the kitchen with a stack of place cards almost as tall as she was.

"I already decided," she announced, dropping the cards on the counter and sorting them like top-secret documents. 

"Grandma Martha goes at the end, next to nobody important. Serena goes across from Daddy, not beside him. Across."

"Why across?" I asked.

She looked at me like the answer was obvious. "Because beside him means she can whisper stuff nobody else hears. " Across means everybody sees everything she does." 

She dropped the last card with a satisfied thump. "I watch a lot of spy shows."

"Since when?" I asked.

"Since always," she said, like the question itself was a little bit insulting.

"What about you? Where do you want to sit?"

She thought about it like a general planning troop positions. "Next to you. Somebody has to protect the good seat."

I laughed for the first time all day. Nikolai was watching us with a look I didn't yet have a name for. something close to relief.

****

POV: NIKOLAI

I've sat through plenty of briefings before big deals. Men with decades of experience and expensive handshakes. 

None of them were half as useful as the woman standing at my kitchen counter with a legal pad and a list of exactly which lies to expect, and in what order. 

I almost laughed at the idea of comparing her to my consultants. She would have won that comparison without even trying. 

It was, honestly, the best negotiation prep I'd ever received. It was delivered in my own kitchen by a woman still bracing herself for a night she'd clearly spent alone a hundred times before.

I filed away every detail the way I file everything that matters. 

The flattery would be reconnaissance. The tears would be a performance. Serena's hands would find my arm in the first ten minutes, and I'd be ready to know exactly where to move.

What stayed with me most wasn't the information itself, but the question beneath it.

The one she never asked out loud, though I heard it anyway, was hidden in the calm way she described her family's cruelty like weather reports instead of wounds. 

I thought about my own father. The flat, careful way I'd learned to talk about him over the years. Like describing a storm, you stopped expecting anyone to shelter you a long time ago. 

We had that in common, apparently, whatever else set us apart. Neither of us grew up believing help would just show up when we needed it. I never told anyone that about my father. 

Not my board, not my lawyers, not even Ivy's mother when she was alive. 

I told Beatrix without meaning to, standing in my own kitchen, and I didn't regret it.

Nobody had ever made her a plan for surviving her own dinner table. She'd learned to get through it alone, year after year, and she came into my life still expecting to do it that way.

I wasn't going to let her.

Ivy's seating chart caught me off guard when I finally looked at it. Serena's card was directly across from mine, not beside it. 

I asked why, mostly out of curiosity, and got a full breakdown involving sightlines, whispering, and apparently a lot more spy shows than I realized my daughter was watching.

I didn't say a word about how my eight-year-old had outsmarted a grown woman before she even walked through the door. 

I filed that away too, quietly proud in a way I didn't look at too closely.

It struck me, looking at those careful place cards, that Ivy had picked up something from watching Beatrix over the past few weeks that no tutor had ever managed to teach her. 

How to protect the people you love before anyone even has to ask. I wondered briefly where she'd learned that at such a young age. Then I remembered who she'd been living with for the last few weeks and stopped wondering.

By seven, the house had gone still in the way it does right before guests arrive. Every surface is polished. Every candle lit. 

Beatrix stood beside me at the front door in a dress the color of deep water, her hands twisted together like she was bracing for impact. 

I've sat through state dinners. Closed deals worth more than some countries' budgets. 

I’d stood in rooms so thick with tension you could choke on it. None of it prepared me for the silence of standing beside my wife while she waited for her mother to arrive.

I reached for her hand without thinking. She let me take it. Headlights swept across the drive.

I watched her spine straighten, the way it always did right before she had to perform for people who had never once earned that effort from her.

Something in me refused to let her do it alone tonight. Whatever had built that kind of armor in her, I planned to make sure, before the night was over, that she understood she didn't have to wear it by herself anymore. 

Not tonight. Not after tonight either, if I had anything to say about it.

I leaned down, close enough that only she would hear me over the sound of car doors opening outside.

"You are not sitting at that table alone tonight," I said. "Whatever they bring through that door, they're bringing it to both of us."

She looked up at me, and something bright crossed her face, as if nobody had ever said something that simple and truly meant it. 

She took a breath and steadied herself just as the doorbell rang loudly. 

It sounded like a war she'd fought alone for twenty-six years, finally becoming, for one night at least, mine too. I squeezed her hand once before letting go. 

Whatever came through that door next, we'd face it together.