Under the Chandelier
She went to the gala anyway. Reconnaissance, not defiance, she told herself, though the two felt the same in her chest as she stood in a borrowed dress at the foot of a marble staircase that probably cost more than four years of her tuition combined.
"You look lost," said a voice beside her. A young man in a slate-blue suit, dark hair, an easy grin. "First Founders' Evening?"
"That obvious?"
"You're the only person here who read the seating chart instead of ignoring it." He extended a hand. "Sebastian Corvin."
Of course he was.
"Isla Marchetti."
Something flickered behind his eyes at her name — there and gone so fast she almost missed it — but he covered it with a smile and steered her toward the hors d'oeuvres like it was nothing.
For twenty minutes it felt like nothing. He was funny, unpretentious in a way she hadn't expected from a surname like his, complaining about his grandmother's seating arrangements. Isla let herself relax, just slightly.
Then the crowd near the staircase parted, the way crowds part for money and age combined, and an old woman came through it in gray silk, spine straight as a blade, eyes moving over the room like she was auditing it.
"Grandmother," Sebastian said, his voice changing — careful now, performative. "This is Isla Marchetti. One of the trust's scholars."
Dorothea Corvin stopped walking.
She looked at Isla the way you look at a word on the tip of your tongue, and then her face did something Isla would replay for weeks — it went briefly, entirely still, the practiced pleasantness dropping away like a mask slipping.
"Marchetti," Dorothea repeated, testing it, and it was clear she found it wanting.
She stepped close enough that Isla could smell her perfume, old and expensive, and looked at her the way you'd look at a ghost wearing borrowed clothes.
"You have her eyes," Dorothea said, quietly, almost gently, almost cruelly. "Rosalind's eyes."
The string quartet kept playing. Sebastian went very pale.
Her mother's name, in this woman's mouth, in this house, for the first time.