Chapter 4: Aunt Claire
The Charleston Maritime Center had been turned into a ballroom: white linen, magnolia branches in tall vases, a jazz trio, two hundred people in black tie. Through the windows, the harbor was going pink and gold.
Daniel’s phone rang in the parking garage. Port business, Norfolk, a crane down. “Go ahead,” he said, holding the door. “Ten minutes. I promise.”
So I walked into Tyler Hayes’s big night alone, in an emerald satin gown, with my hair up and my grandmother’s pearl earrings in.
Tyler saw me before I’d made it past the coat check. Of course it was the coat check.
He crossed the room with a glass of bourbon in his hand and that same patient smile. Brooke trailed behind him in red, and on her left hand was a square diamond in an old platinum setting. His grandmother’s ring. My ring.
“Claire,” Tyler said loudly enough for the people nearby to turn around. “Wow. Catering’s through the back, though.”
A few people laughed. Brooke laughed too, and then glanced at me, and stopped.
“I’m a guest,” I said.
“Of who?” He looked around, grinning, inviting the room in on the joke. “Let me guess. You’re doing the desserts and they gave you a plus-one.”
Diane appeared at his elbow in silver silk. She didn’t smile. “Who invited you?”
Before I could answer, the room changed. I don’t know how else to describe it. Conversations dropped off one table at a time, the way they do when someone important walks in. A gray-haired man near the bar, the board chairman, Walter Greer, put down his drink and went straight to the door with his hand already out.
“Daniel. We didn’t think you’d make it.”
Daniel shook his hand, said something polite, and kept walking. He was wearing a black tuxedo, and he looked like the man who owned the building, which, I found out later, he did. He came straight through the crowd to me and took my hand.
“Sorry,” he said. “Crane.” Then he turned to his sister-in-law.
“Diane, this is Claire. My wife.”
Diane’s face went perfectly still. Brooke’s hand flew to her mouth. Tyler laughed once, a short ugly sound, and then didn’t laugh again.
“You’re kidding,” he said.
“Hello, Tyler.” Daniel’s voice was pleasant. “You can call her Aunt Claire.”
Walter Greer coughed into his fist to keep from laughing.
For the next hour, people I’d never met came over to shake my hand. Two board members asked whether Sugar & Salt did corporate orders. Diane watched me from across the room like I was a fire she didn’t know how to put out.
Tyler found me on the terrace when Daniel went to take another call.
“You did this to get back at me.” His face was flushed and his voice was low. “Admit it. You went after my uncle.”
“I didn’t know he was your uncle until Christmas Eve.”
“Sure.”
“Not everything is about you, Tyler.” I turned back to the water. “It never was. You just never noticed.”
He stood there a second longer. Then he walked away, and I watched him take his phone out and type something fast.
At a quarter to ten, Daniel came and found me by the railing. He wasn’t smiling now.
“The board meets upstairs at ten,” he said. “Seven votes plus mine. Diane has three of them. Walter has three. They’ll split.”
“So you decide.”
“I’m recusing myself. He’s my nephew, you’re my wife, and I don’t trust myself tonight.” He took a folded document out of his jacket and put it in my hand. It had his signature at the bottom and my name typed above it. “My shares vote tonight. The proxy is yours.”
“Daniel. I bake pies.”
“You’re also the only person in that building he never lied to about money.” His gray eyes held mine. “Only about everything else. Read the folder again. Then do whatever you think is right, and I’ll stand behind it.”
Inside, the band stopped playing. Walter Greer tapped a glass and asked the board to make their way upstairs.
Tyler passed us on the stairs with Brooke on his arm. He leaned close to my ear as he went by.
“Careful, Aunt Claire,” he whispered. “I know things about you too.”
