“Stop hiding,” she said, the words light but edged. “Come meet Tessa’s future mother-in-law. She’s asking about you.”
There was subtext in her tone, well-worn and familiar: Please don’t embarrass us. Please, just this once, be easy.
“I wasn’t hiding,” I murmured, but the protest was pointless. I followed anyway, weaving behind her into the center of the glittering machine.
The knot of women near the dessert table looked like a catalog page: silk. Diamonds. Tastefully subtle cosmetic work. Plates of tiny pastries everyone pretended not to eat. A waiter flitted past with a tray, and my mother snagged another glass.
“This is my other daughter,” she announced.
Not “Lena.” Not “my eldest.” Not “my brilliant software engineer daughter, the one who rebuilt a failing division from scratch.” Just my other daughter. A spare.
The women turned toward me as one. Their eyes were polite, assessing, and already slightly bored.
“Oh,” said a graceful woman in navy, her hair swept into an elegant chignon. Her pearls glittered like punctuation marks. “The one who works with computers.”
“Software engineering,” I said, because the words were a small spine I could straighten.
“How nice.” Her smile didn’t quite move her eyes. They slid over my dress—simple black, nothing remarkable, bought because it fit and didn’t demand attention—then drifted away. “Tessa says you work from home. That must be so convenient.”
