Chapter 15 - What I Served the Next New Year’s Eve
One year later, I hosted dinner again.
Not a spectacle.
Not a performance.
Just eight people I trusted: my sister, Mara, Neil and his husband, my therapist’s old college friend who had become my actual friend somehow, and two women from work who had quietly checked on me every week when everything was falling apart.
Hope slept upstairs by 10:30.
The table was smaller this time. The food simpler. The laughter real.
No one needed to be managed.
No one needed to be appeased.
No one expected me to finance their self-importance and call it love.
At eleven fifty-five, Mara lifted her glass and said, “To clean ledgers.”
Neil added, “To enforceable signatures.”
I laughed.
Then I raised my own glass.
“To the people who never confuse peace with silence.”
They drank to that.
A few minutes before midnight, I stepped away from the table and stood by the window where the skyline glittered over Denver. The scar beneath my dress still tugged sometimes when the weather changed. The divorce decree had been final for months. The civil recovery case was nearly closed. The penthouse remained solely mine.
So did my future.
When fireworks began over the city, I didn’t think about Ryan in prison, or Grant with his collapsed empire, or Brooke rebuilding whatever life remains when deceit stops paying.
I thought about my daughter asleep upstairs.
I thought about the woman I had been at that table one year earlier, stunned and burning and still somehow standing.
May you like
Then I went back to my guests, carried out dessert with steady hands, and served it in the same dining room where my silence had finally ended.
This time, what I placed on the table belonged entirely to me.
