Cellie's POV
My mother found me forty minutes later.
I was on my second whiskey and had been watching the room with the particular detachment of someone who was present in body and elsewhere in mind — running the edges of what Demetrio had not told me against everything else I knew, turning the shape of the omission over and over, trying to find where it started and where it ended. The party moved around me with the warm, self-sustaining energy of a gathering that no longer needed tending. The candles had burned lower. Someone had turned the music up a degree.
"You've been standing here drinking all evening," she said, materializing at my elbow with the specific quality she had of arriving without warning whenever I had achieved a temporary peace — as though she could sense it from across a room and felt compelled to address it. "You're going to give people the wrong impression."
"I genuinely hope it's working," I said into my glass.
