“Mother,” James said icily, giving her a slight bow.
“Hi, Mrs. Preston,” I said in what I hoped was a casual, friendly way. I was trying to balance out James’s formal coldness. After what he’d told me, I didn’t blame him for how he felt about her. But now more than ever, I needed to step up my performance. He’d helped me, and I wanted to help him. I needed to make this easier for him. “You look so pretty.”
“My swelling from the filler went down, just as expected,” she said.
“I have to go up front,” James said to me, nodding toward Todd and the rest of the wedding party. “Will you be okay?”
“I’m fine,” I said. I smiled at his mother bravely. “Your mother and I can watch.”
“Great,” James said, giving his mother a warning look. “This shouldn’t take too long. I hope.”
“James—it’s your brother’s night. Let it take as long as it needs to,” Celia said. She motioned for me to follow her to a pew closer to the front, and I obeyed. Of course I obeyed—I wasn’t about to argue with her. I sat down next to her, careful not to get too close.
“So,” she said, arranging her skirt and turning her unnaturally smooth face to me. “James seems more enraged with me than usual. I assume you told him about our conversation about grandchildren at tea.”
That, and he told me you made his high-school girlfriend cry so hard she hydroplaned her car into a guardrail and died.
“I might have mentioned it to him,” I said carefully. “But I had no idea how upset he would get.”
“Did he talk to you about the trust?”
I did not care for Celia Preston, but I did admire her ability to be direct. I didn’t want to tell her the truth, but I didn’t see a way out. “He did,” I admitted.
She sighed and sat back a little. “He’s never understood my perspective—he takes moral offense to it. But that is limited thinking on his part. What James doesn’t understand is that having a family requires an enormous sense of duty. One must put one’s family before oneself. You have to protect it. Your family is all you’ve got in life, Audrey.”
She gave me a quick look. “Oh—sorry dear, I forgot that all your family’s dead.”
“No, you didn’t,” I said.
She gave me a terse smile. “You’re right. I didn’t.”
I wanted to roll my eyes at her but I didn’t dare. We sat there in silence for a minute, watching the priest discuss the ceremony with Evie and Todd. James stood behind his brother, his arms crossed tight against his chest, glaring at his mother.
“James doesn’t approve of Evie,” Celia continued. “But what he sees as a lack of a personality and good judgment, I see as an opportunity.”
“How’s that?” I asked.
“She has the proper family and the proper pedigree—her parents met at Tabor Academy. She has a trust fund. She registered at Shreve, Crump & Low, and I didn’t even have to tell her to. She’s an appropriate addition to the Preston family.”
Everything that Evie had, I didn’t. Celia was telling me in no uncertain terms that I was an inappropriate candidate for the Preston family. And she didn’t know the half of it. She’d thought Danielle—of the full-boat biology scholarship to Brown and the poor but respectable family—was bad. Next to me, Danielle was like the Patron Saint of Louis Vuitton.
“I know everything there is to know about Evie,” Celia said.
I looked at her doubtfully, and she raised an eyebrow at me. Her filler had absorbed enough so that it actually lifted a little. “Oh, but I do—I know that she tried to sleep with James.”
I must have looked shocked, because Celia looked triumphant and patted my knee. “Todd tells me everything, dear. Unlike James.”
“So—why do you want them to get married?” I asked bluntly.
“Because she’s easy to control, of course.” She smiled at me. “Evie loves money more than anything. She and Todd have signed an airtight prenuptial agreement. If Evie cheats, Evie gets nothing. If Evie tries to divorce Todd, Evie gets nothing. If Evie wears a blouse I don’t like, Evie gets nothing. Just kidding about that last one. But close enough.” She watched her son holding Evie’s hand, still talking to the priest.
“I think Evie loves him,” I said. I was surprised to hear myself defending her, but still.