He didn’t like steady.
He reached down, snatched the wig clean off her head in one motion—no hesitation, no softness—held it dangling between his fingers like something dirty, then tossed it into the trash can by the bar. It landed without a sound. Rochelle lifted her champagne flute, tipped her head, and took a small sip, as if she’d just been served a private joke.
The room died.
Forks hung in the air. A woman near the stage pressed her hand to her chest. The quartet kept playing, but the music turned invisible, swallowed by the quiet. Paige stood bareheaded under the chandelier. Her scalp glistened in the warm light. She pressed her palm flat against it, breathed out slow, and lifted her chin as if she’d been born for judgment and was finally getting her turn to deliver it.
The humiliation was the appetizer; the main course had been plated weeks ago.
In the far corner near the coat check, the woman in the navy dress didn’t move. Her pearl-rimmed reading glasses caught the chandelier light when she shifted her gaze from Paige to Wendell. A stack of documents sat beside an untouched glass of water, squared at the edges like it had been measured with a ruler. Nobody in the room knew who she was. Nobody had noticed her arrive. But she’d been waiting for six months, and she had not come empty-handed.
Seven years earlier, Paige and Wendell met in a Tuesday night business class at Riverside Community College. She was twenty-four, he was twenty-six. Paige sat in the front row with a notebook full of notes so meticulous they looked like they’d been typed. Wendell sat two rows behind her and spent most of the lecture watching the way she leaned forward when she wrote, like the words mattered more than anything else in the room.
After week three he approached her, told her she was the smartest person in that classroom, and asked her out for coffee. She said she didn’t drink coffee. He said he didn’t either. They both laughed, and that laugh carried them through months of late-night calls that lasted until three in the morning, a first kiss in a parking lot after a thunderstorm, and a small wedding at her mother’s church where Geneva Carter cried harder than Paige had ever seen.
The early years were sweet the way early years can be—one-bedroom apartment, mismatched furniture, a kitchen so small they had to take turns standing at the stove. Wendell brought home gas-station flowers on Fridays. Paige left notes in his lunch bag. They talked about the future like it was a room they were building together, one wall at a time. Within a year they were married. Within two, they had a daughter named Ayana, round-faced and loud with joy, the kind of baby who laughed in her sleep. Within three, Paige turned a late-night dream into a real business.
She started Paige’s Table from her kitchen with $400 and a borrowed convection oven. Every recipe was written by hand on index cards. She filed the LLC paperwork herself at the county clerk’s office. She got the health permits by standing in line for three hours with Ayana on her hip. She made her first delivery in a borrowed van with her baby strapped into a car seat beside aluminum pans wrapped in foil.
