POV: Jasmine
Liam ended the call and turned to face me in the hallway.
"Jackson's statement drops tomorrow morning." He said it evenly, still processing it as he spoke. "Priya's source is at the PR firm. They're drafting tonight."
I stood with that for a moment and felt the shape of it — the timeline collapsing, the window contracting from days to hours, the deadline suddenly closer and moving faster.
"We can skip the ceremony," Liam said. "Go back inside and start now."
I looked at him. At the tuxedo. At the lobby behind us, the car waiting at the kerb, the evening assembled around us with the fragility of something arranged before the world decided to move.
"No," I said.
He waited.
"The ceremony is the first time Cadence is being publicly honored since Eleanor's name was restored to the founding documents." I said it slowly, not because I was uncertain but because the weight of it deserved the pace.
"He timed this for tomorrow morning because he wants tonight to be the last good night before his version becomes the one people read first.
"I am not giving him that. We honour Eleanor in the room she would have wanted. And the moment we are back in the apartment, we start."
Liam looked at me for a long moment. Then he brought my hand up and pressed his mouth to my knuckles — brief, certain, a gesture that said everything it needed to without requiring words.
"Let's go," he said.
The car was warm and the city moved past the windows and neither of us spoke. There was nothing left to decide. We had decided it in the hallway, and what remained was simply doing it — walking into the room, standing in it for Eleanor, and leaving with everything intact.
The Beaumont ballroom was what it always was — chandeliers, polished floors, the low hum of an industry gathered to congratulate itself on its better moments.
I had been in this room for a dozen events. Tonight it felt different. Tonight Eleanor's name was on the programme.
Priya was already at the table when we arrived, her phone face-down, her expression carefully arranged in the way it got when she was sitting on information she had not yet decided to distribute.
She stood and kissed my cheek and said nothing about Jackson and I did not mention him and we both understood each other completely.
Finn arrived late, sliding into his seat looking like he had been somewhere more interesting until the last possible moment and was not entirely sorry about it. He apologised once, glanced at the stage, and picked up the programme.
"Asher's not here," he said. Not quite a question.
"No," Liam said.
Finn set the programme down. The word sat between the three of us for a moment, carrying what it was carrying, and then the lights shifted and the evening began.
I sat at the table and watched Liam when they called his name. He walked to the stage with the ease that came from years in public rooms — the mechanics of it had long since become unconscious, automatic, requiring nothing from him except his actual presence.
He stood at the podium and looked out at the room.
Watching him from here — from a distance, from a seat in the crowd — I felt recognition, sharp and specific. Not pride exactly, though that was part of it. More the clarity of seeing someone you loved operating at the full register of what they were.
He gave the speech he had been rewriting all week. I had heard every version of it — had read the draft on his phone when he handed it over and asked if it was right. I had given him one note. He had taken it without argument.
I watched him stand at the podium and I listened.
"My mother started this company in a room that fit maybe six people," he said. "With a roster that was three artists and a considerable amount of optimism. She did not have a clear model. She had an ear. Which turned out to be the only model that mattered."
The room was quiet in the way rooms went quiet when someone was saying something true.
"What she understood — and what I spent years learning from her, and some additional years relearning — was that this industry owes you nothing. The only thing that survives is the work. And the work only survives if the people behind it are honest about what it is for."
He paused.
"Eleanor Blackwood was honest about that. Always. Sometimes at considerable personal cost."
Another pause. Shorter.
"Tonight we are here to recognise what she built. I want to say her name in a room like this one, because there was a period when her name was not in the rooms it should have been in. That was wrong. We have done what we can to correct it."
He looked out at the room.
"Eleanor Blackwood."
Applause started before he stepped back from the microphone.
I sat with my hands folded in my lap — one over the other, over the finger that did not yet have a ring on it, over the place where it would go when I was ready.
Grief moved through me. Relief moved through me. And underneath both, a feeling closer to justice than I had expected to find in a room like this.
Some things deserved to arrive without other things crowding the frame. I let the moment be what it was.
The applause rose and settled. Liam came down from the stage, moving through the room. People touched his arm and said what people said after a speech that had landed.
He had almost reached our table.
A man intercepted him at the edge of the floor. Older — expensive in the way that no longer needed announcing. His suit did not call attention to itself.
His hand went to Liam's arm without hesitation — the gesture of a man accustomed to being received, not questioned.
He said something. Brief, low, the angle of it turned away from the room.
Liam went very still.
Then he turned his head and looked across the ballroom, directly through the crowd, directly at me.
Not at the table. Not at Priya or Finn. At me. His face had shifted into the calculation he did when something arrived that he had not been prepared for — fast, quiet, working through it.
The man's hand was still on his arm. I did not move.