The sound was so unexpected that several people turned. Then a nurse joined. Then another. Applause moved through the lobby in a strange restrained wave—not jubilant, not theatrical, but relieved. They were not applauding my humiliation or Mark’s collapse. They were applauding the end of an atmosphere they had apparently all been breathing for longer than I knew.
I did not bow. I did not smile. My blazer still burned against my skin. My husband had just been led away for theft and adultery. There are moments when applause feels less like praise than proof that everyone else also heard the crack.
I turned instead to Henry.
He had not moved.
“Are you all right?” I asked.
He nodded once, but his eyes were bright in a way that told me the answer was more complicated than that.
“I’m sorry,” he said quietly.
“For what?”
He glanced toward the spot where Tiffany had been standing. “For not stopping it sooner. She’d been rude before. I thought it was youth. Then I thought it was nerves. Then I thought maybe I was old and easy to bully and it wasn’t worth making trouble.”
The ache that went through me then had nothing to do with Mark or Tiffany. “Henry,” I said, “if anyone in this building ever makes you feel that preserving your dignity counts as making trouble, they can come explain that to me personally.”
His chin wobbled once. He straightened it with visible effort. “Your daddy would have skinned him alive.”
“He’d have started with the tie,” I said.
That got the beginning of a smile.
David, still beside me, exhaled through his nose. “I hate to interrupt your coup, Catherine, but Mr. York made it to the cath lab alive, and I’d rather not lose him because all of cardiology is down here gawking.”
“Then go save him.”
He looked at me, at the stain on my jacket, at the tremor I had not yet managed to hide in my left hand. “You sure?”
“No,” I said. “But go anyway.”
He squeezed my shoulder once and left.
Arthur motioned to Tiffany and she went with him, flanked by two members of legal and a female security officer. The crowd began to loosen. People drifted back toward duty with the lingering dazed expressions of those who have accidentally witnessed a tectonic shift before their first coffee.
I looked down at my blazer again.
The silk was ruined. There was no use pretending otherwise. I touched the edge of the stain with one fingertip and felt an absurd wave of grief. Not for the garment itself, though it had been beautiful. For the memory attached to it.
