“Go on. Down on your knees. I want to see you crawl for the tip you’re not getting.” Vivienne’s voice carried across the ballroom, loud enough that the string quartet actually paused. I felt every eye in the room pin itself to my back. The manager, Grant, stood by the kitchen door twisting his hands into his cummerbund, refusing to meet my eyes. A woman at the next table opened her mouth, then closed it when she saw whose table it was. The Ashford-Kanes donated the wing the gala was named after. Nobody was coming. I bent down slowly to pick up the shards of the glass Vivienne had ‘dropped’ on my shoe, and she actually clapped. Two slow, delighted claps. Then my phone buzzed in my apron pocket. I ignored it. It buzzed again. And again. On the fourth call I answered, mostly to have something to do that wasn’t crying in front of two hundred people. “Daniel, where are you?” It was my assistant, Priya, and her voice was tight. “The board moved the vote up. They’re in the room. They need the CEO in the building in fifteen minutes or Ashford-Kane Holdings loses the acquisition.” I froze with a piece of glass in my hand. Vivienne was still talking, something about how she’d have me fired by dessert. I stood up. I set the glass on her bread plate. I untied the apron and folded it neatly over the back of her chair. “Priya,” I said, loud enough for the whole table, “tell the board the new majority owner is walking in now. And pull the Meridian Room contract from our hospitality portfolio while you’re at it.” Vivienne’s smile cracked. Her husband, Reginald Ashford-Kane, went the color of the tablecloth. I’d taken the banquet job because my grandfather’s will required me to work six months of service work before I could inherit and vote his shares. Tonight was night ninety-one. And Vivienne had just spent the last hour humiliating the man who now owned the company her husband ran, the building she was standing in, and the charity whose name was on her dress.
