At my sister’s rehearsal dinner, the American flag on Senator Whitmore’s lapel caught the light every time he lifted his champagne flute. The St. Regis ballroom was all crystal and gold, white orchids spilling out of vases taller than I was.
Sinatra floated from hidden speakers, blended with the clink of ice in highball glasses and the low hum of old money conversation. One hundred and fifty gold-rimmed place cards sat on linen-draped tables, each in the perfect looping script of a calligrapher who probably charged more than most people’s rent. I walked the perimeter once, slowly, pretending to admire the centerpieces.
I wasn’t looking at the flowers. I was looking for my name. I never found it.
I saw “Senator Robert Whitmore” in bold black ink. “Thomas Whitmore Jr.” next to him. “James Morrison,” “Marcus Kim,” “Dr.
Sarah Mitchell,” board members, judges, hedge fund managers, the entire San Francisco aristocracy. I saw “Victoria Reynolds” over and over again, on menus and projected on the screens, her initials embroidered into napkins. But I didn’t see “Hannah Reynolds.”
“Looking for something?” The voice came from behind me, honeyed and bright.
I turned to find Victoria gliding toward me, all teeth and couture. Even in rehearsal-dinner mode, she was a walking advertisement for her own carefully curated life, from the custom champagne-colored dress to the diamond bracelet her parents had “loaned” her from the family safe. Beside us, a server adjusted an arrangement of tiny flag toothpicks in the sliders on the appetizer table, red-white-blue catching the light as if the room itself were winking at the irony.
“My seat,” I said. “Where am I sitting?”
She touched my arm with the light, proprietary pat of someone claiming a pet. “Oh, Hannah.
Budget constraints, remember? We had to prioritize important guests. You understand.”
“I’m your sister,” I said.
“Foster sister,” she corrected, the way you correct a child mispronouncing a word. “There’s a difference. We’re family by circumstance, not choice.”
Our father, Richard Reynolds, materialized at my shoulder, Scotch in hand, cuff links flashing.
“Hannah, don’t make this difficult. If you’re hungry, the kitchen staff has a break room.”
The room went quiet in that subtle way rich rooms do. Conversations didn’t stop; they thinned, like someone had turned the volume down.
Eyes shifted. Head tilts angled. One hundred and fifty people watched the orphan learn her place.
At table two, I saw three executives from Apex Ventures, faces pulled tight with discomfort. Marcus Kim’s people. The ones who already knew more about me than my “family” ever bothered to ask.
Margaret Reynolds drifted over in her Chanel suit, pearls resting exactly where a stylist would have placed them. “Dear, this is a sophisticated event. Perhaps you’d be more comfortable elsewhere.”
You’d think, after fifteen years with them, humiliation would stop feeling like a punch.
It never did. It just landed on top of old bruises. “You’re right,” I said, my voice as level as the white linen in front of us.
“I would be more comfortable elsewhere.”
Victoria laughed, a tinkling, champagne-glass sound that could cut glass. “Finally, some self-awareness.”
I smiled at her, the kind of smile you give a person who has no idea they’re standing on a trapdoor. “If you’ll excuse me, I need to freshen up.” I lifted my phone just enough for her to see the screen light up.
“I have some calls to make.”
“Don’t bother coming to the wedding tomorrow,” she called after me, loud enough for the room to hear. “Security will have instructions.”
Laughter rippled through the ballroom. I stopped at the door, turned back, and gave them a real smile for the first time in fifteen years.
“I wouldn’t miss it for the world,” I said. That was the last thing I said to them as the girl who didn’t have a seat at their table. By the time I stepped into the quiet of the parking garage and slid into my Tesla, I’d already started the timer on their downfall.
The Reynolds family, old-money aristocrats from San Francisco, took me in as their ward when I was still in high school. Not out of kindness, despite the story Margaret liked to tell for the country club circuit. According to her version, they “opened their hearts and home to a poor foster girl who had nowhere else to go.”
According to the truth, Margaret Reynolds needed a charity case to polish her philanthropist image, a living prop she could mention at galas between sips of Napa Cabernet.
The story doesn’t end here — it continues on the next page to discover the rest 🔎👇
