Chapter 2: The Champagne Toast

The call came from Priya, who had been Naomi's closest friend since university and who still moved in enough of the same circles as Julian to hear things Naomi no longer did.

"I probably shouldn't tell you this," Priya said, "but I'd want to know if it were me. There's a dinner tonight. Private, at the Ashcombe house. It's for Ivy. Half of Julian's friend group is going."

Naomi sat with the phone against her ear for a long moment. "And I wasn't invited."

"No," Priya said quietly. "You weren't."

Naomi thanked her and hung up, and she sat on the edge of her bed for a while looking at nothing in particular. She could have let it go. A week ago, maybe even a few days ago, she might have. But something in her had shifted since the diagnosis, since the email still sitting unread in her drawer, since the sight of Julian's face lit up on a screen for a woman who wasn't her, and she found she no longer had the appetite for pretending not to notice things.

She dressed carefully, not for Julian and not for Ivy, but because she wanted to walk into that room exactly as herself, and she drove to the Ashcombe house alone.

The front of the house was lit up and loud with the particular energy of a party in full swing, valets moving cars, laughter spilling from open windows. Naomi didn't go to the front door. She circled around to the terrace instead, where a side door stood propped open to let in the evening air, and she let herself in quietly, unnoticed by anyone at first.

She heard the laughter before she reached the sitting room, familiar voices, Julian's friends, the kind of people she had spent five years smiling politely at over dinners she never quite enjoyed. She stopped just outside the doorway, out of sight, and listened.

"Honestly, can you imagine her trying to host something like this," one of them was saying, a man named Desmond who had never much liked her and never bothered hiding it. "She can barely hold a champagne glass steady these days."

Someone laughed. Then came a scraping sound, a chair pushed back, and Desmond's voice again, higher now, exaggerated, clearly performing. "Oh, careful, careful, don't want to spill," he said, and Naomi understood without seeing it that he was mimicking her, mimicking the stiffness in her fingers, the small tremor that sometimes crept into her grip when she was tired or cold.

The room erupted into laughter. Naomi stood very still in the hallway with her hand curled at her side, the same hand, and listened to a room full of people she had once considered friends laugh at the shape of her injury as though it were a party trick.

Through the gap in the doorway she could see Ivy, seated close beside Julian, her hand resting lightly on his forearm, delighted, laughing along with everyone else, watching the performance with the easy comfort of someone who belonged exactly where she was sitting.

Naomi did not decide to walk in. Her feet simply carried her there before the rest of her had finished deciding, and she stepped into the doorway just as Desmond was mid impression, his hand curled into a mockery of hers.

The laughter died instantly, all at once, like someone had cut the sound from the room.

Julian rose so fast his chair scraped loudly against the floor. "Naomi." His face had gone pale, then flushed. "I didn't know you were coming."

"Clearly," she said.

"It was just a joke," Julian said quickly, glancing around the room as though looking for support. "Desmond didn't mean anything by it, you're being a little sensitive, that's all."

Naomi looked past him, past the friends who had gone suddenly very interested in their drinks, and let her eyes land on Ivy, still seated, still with her hand on Julian's arm as though she hadn't moved it, as though she saw no reason to.

"I have a question for the room," Naomi said, and her voice came out steadier than she expected, almost calm. "Can someone explain to me why nobody thought to invite the wife to her own husband's dinner?"

Nobody answered. Desmond looked at his glass. Someone near the back cleared their throat. Ivy's smile faltered for just a second before settling back into place, careful and composed.

"Naomi," Julian said again, lower this time, reaching toward her arm.

She stepped back before he could touch her. "A joke told at someone's expense, where the person it's about isn't laughing, isn't a joke," she said. "It's cruelty wearing a costume, Julian. And you let it happen at your table."

He opened his mouth, some apology or excuse already forming, but she didn't wait to hear it. She turned and walked back out through the terrace door the way she'd come, and Julian called after her, told her to wait, told her he'd get the driver to take her home.

"I'll walk," she said, without turning around.

The night air was cold and clear and she welcomed it, welcomed the sting of it against her face as she walked down the long drive and out onto the street, past the row of parked cars belonging to people who had laughed at her hand an hour ago. She did not cry. She had expected to, a little, but instead she found her mind already moving past the humiliation, already turning over the shape of what came next, the federation offer waiting in her drawer, the thirty day window slowly narrowing. Whatever wound the evening had left, she decided somewhere along that dark stretch of road, she would carry it forward instead of sitting with it. She had spent five years nursing smaller hurts than this one. She was done doing that.