My mother-in-law brought thirty-eight friends into my restaurant, ordered the most expensive menu on it, and told them she was paying. Then she started boasting about my husband’s new girlfriend — and I looked across the room at the young woman refilling their water.

The table went quiet.

So did I.

Constance laughed. “Oh, don’t pull those faces. Juliet’s never home. She lives here. Tobias knows how to enjoy himself.”

And a woman at the far end said, “On what money?”

Constance lifted my bottle.

“This place’s, of course. It all stays in the family.”

I had been looking at withdrawals on my business account for three months. Hotels. Jewellery. Transfers I could not explain.

What I had not known until that second was that his mother knew every bit of it.

And while she raised her glass to thirty-eight women, my eyes went past her, across the private room, to the young hostess at the side table with a water jug in her hand.

Who had gone completely still, halfway through pouring.
PART 2 — THREE YEARS OF COMPS

I did the arithmetic that night at the office desk.

Three years. A hundred and twelve visits by Constance Rook, usually with between two and eleven guests. Every one of them comped on my instruction because Tobias asked me to.