He was twenty-four and objectively, undeniably handsome - dark hair, jaw that looked engineered for visual impact, a mouth that the island's female population had been discussing at length since he'd come home from his mainland university two years ago. He carried himself with the ease of a man who had never needed to work for a room's attention.
He found Priscilla in the crowd immediately. He always did.
He smiled. It was the smile she had come to dread - slow, certain, absolutely without question. The smile of a man who had already decided she was his and was now simply in the pleasant process of formality.
She looked away first. She always did.
"He's doing that thing again," Jade said quietly beside her.
"I know."
"The looking-at-you-like-you're-already-his-property thing."
"I know, Jade."
"You could just tell him-"
"Jade." Priscilla put a slight, specific weight on the name, and Jade subsided. But she saw the way her cousin's gaze moved past Priscilla's shoulder to where Chad stood in the courtyard - that quick, hungry look, instantly suppressed, that she thought no one noticed.
Priscilla noticed. She had been noticing for months.
Some conversations required the right moment. She hadn't found it yet.
"Come on," Clara said, herding them both toward the chapel doors. "The chaplain's taken his position. We need to be inside."
The ceremony ran forty-seven minutes. The chaplain spoke about continuity and community. The string quartet played. The garlands were blessed. Each debutante was called forward in turn, received her wreath of white plumeria from the chaplain's hands, and turned to face the assembled island with a composed expression and whatever private feelings she was managing beneath it.
When Priscilla's name was called, she walked to the front of the chapel and stood in the fall of light from the high eastern windows, and she thought about her father's voice last Tuesday evening, drifting through the hallway from the study where he'd been on the phone with Sterling Whitmore: She's eighteen now. Time to make it formal. I'll have Diana put together a dinner - we can do the announcement there. And Sterling's comfortable, satisfied response: My thoughts exactly.
She received her garland. She faced the assembled island. She smiled for the photographs.
She thought: This is not my life.
The Coral Room was adjacent to the chapel - the best restaurant on South Cay, which on an island of this size meant a well-maintained dining room with good linen, a wine list that was better than you'd expect, and a kitchen that had been cooking island-sourced fish and produce for thirty years. Sterling Whitmore had made a reservation for twenty and intended, Priscilla understood, to make full use of the setting.
She sat between her mother and Jade. Chad sat directly across the table, where he could watch her without obstruction, which she suspected was not a coincidence.
The champagne appeared. The appetizers were beautiful. Sterling made a toast about the island and its future. Diana complimented each of the debutantes in turn with the practiced grace of a woman running a very long social performance.
When Diana reached Priscilla: "You are simply radiant today, my dear. That gown - is that silk? Sterling, doesn't she look like something out of a magazine?"
"She does," Sterling said warmly, and meant it, and there was something about the way he and Martin Grove exchanged a look across the table - brief, satisfied, a deal-within-a-deal - that made Priscilla's stomach tighten.
Her father was in his element. Martin Grove at a table hosted by Sterling Whitmore was Martin Grove at his best - relaxed, expansive, full of the good humor that emerged specifically when he felt things were going the way he wanted. He ordered the most expensive bottle the wine list offered. He told a story about his father's fishing days that had the table laughing. He was doing the thing he did when he was about to deliver news that he knew not everyone would welcome, which was to make the room as warm as possible first.
Priscilla recognized the tactic because she had watched it her entire life.
"You look incredible today," Chad said across the table, when a moment of cross-conversation gave them something resembling privacy. His voice was low, proprietary - the voice of a man who believed that proximity was the same as intimacy.
"Thank you," Priscilla said.
"The white suits you. You should wear it more often."
"I'll take that under advisement."
He leaned forward slightly, and his smile shifted - still confident, but with a new layer of deliberateness. "I've been thinking we should spend some time together this week. Just the two of us. There are things we need to talk about."
Priscilla looked at him steadily. "What kind of things?"
"Planning things." He said it with the ease of a man who had already done the planning, and the conversation was merely a formality in its implementation. "We have a lot of decisions ahead of us. Better to start now."
She opened her mouth. Her father's hand came down lightly on her wrist - not hard, not painful, just present. A reminder.
"In a moment," Martin said pleasantly, addressing no one in particular, and reached for his champagne glass.
The table quieted by degrees as Sterling tapped his fork against his water glass. Conversations at the far end wound down. People turned.
Martin rose. He was not a tall man, but he had a presence when he chose to, a certain quality of occupying space that commanded attention without demanding it.