Throughout dinner, my father and Piers orbited Julie like satellites. Laughter, conversation, warmth. I sat among them like a ghost.
"Here, sweetheart, Daddy brought you something special!" He patted Julie's arm with a beaming smile. "To keep you and the baby safe!"
He reached into his pocket and produced a jade pendant on a silk cord. The surface was smooth and luminous, etched with a delicate pattern meant to ward off harm.
My entire body went rigid.
That was my mother's pendant.
Years ago, when she struggled to conceive, she had climbed to a mountaintop shrine to pray for it. Nine hundred and ninety-nine stone steps. Nine hundred and ninety-nine prostrations. She split her forehead open. Her knees were raw and bloody by the time she reached the top.
After I was born, she gave the pendant to me.
After the accident, I placed it around her neck and prayed it would keep her safe. It stayed there until the day she died.
And now it was a gift from my father to Julie.
"That belonged to my mother!"
"She's dead. What good is a pendant to a corpse?" My father shot me a cold glare. "Giving it to Julie is an honor it doesn't deserve."
He draped it around Julie's neck as he spoke.
Blood rushed to my head. I stared at him and forced every word through clenched teeth. "Do you even know whose child she's carrying?"
His expression froze. His eyes darted away.
That reaction told me everything.
He knew the baby was Piers's. And he'd been helping them deceive me.
"Daddy, I don't need it, really..." Julie's eyes reddened as she reached to take the pendant off.
Piers caught her hand to stop her, then turned to me with a look of reproach. "Geraldine, can't you just behave yourself?"
"Behave?" I laughed. "You steal my dead mother's keepsake, and I'm the one who needs to behave?"
I couldn't hold back any longer. I reached out and snatched the pendant back.
But my father grabbed the silk cord and yanked it hard.
"If you're going to make such a fuss, then nobody gets it!"
A sharp crack. The jade split into pieces and scattered across the floor.
Time stopped.
I stared at the shards. My mother had earned that pendant one prostration at a time, step by agonizing step. It had been my talisman since childhood.
Gone. Just like that.