The Table

Ines moved out of the staff quarters within the month, into a proper suite on the family floor, a change my father made without being asked twice and that the household staff discussed in whispers for weeks.

The first dinner she sat at the actual table, Miles sat between her and my mother, glancing back and forth between them like he still wasn't fully convinced the arrangement would hold, and it was my mother, not my father, who finally reached over and cut Miles's chicken the way he liked it, the same way she'd always cut mine.

It wasn't easy after that, not the clean, tidy kind of easy people want these stories to be. My parents' marriage didn't survive the year, and the divorce, when it came, was its own kind of public spectacle, though a quieter one than the gala had been.

But Miles got his mother back, at an actual table, in actual daylight, and stopped, within a few months, asking why the cook smelled like his shampoo, because by then there was no longer any reason he shouldn't already know.