Marcus finished the sentence into a silent terrace. “…the reason every person working inside this club answers to her. Mrs. Clifton owns Kestrel Hollow. She has for almost thirty years.” A glass clinked as Rosalind set hers down too hard. Camille’s club-member smile did not just fade. It collapsed. She turned to me, then to Desmond, then back to Marcus, waiting for someone to tell her it was a mistake. No one did. Because it was not a mistake. It was the forty years she had never once bothered to ask about.

I finally spoke, gently, because I take no pleasure in humiliating anyone, even someone who had just tried to humiliate me. “It’s true, Camille. I cleaned this clubhouse when I was a young widow with a baby. I scrubbed these floors. And when the club nearly went bankrupt in the nineties, I had saved enough, and learned enough, to buy it. I kept every one of its workers employed. Marcus was a teenager bussing tables then. I put him through management school.” Marcus nodded once, his jaw tight with something that looked like pride and anger both.