I let my eyes go over them.
The Cabots. The Lodges. The Sheffields. Two senators' wives. Three trustees of the MFA. The headmistress who had recommended me to Choate. The doctor who had delivered Annie last week into a family that had been waiting for her like a holiday.
My finger came up.
It rested on the man at the podium I had called Daddy most of my life.
"Him," I said. "And his whole family."
The hall exhaled all at once.
Teddy's whole body shook. "You — you psychopath — do you know who I am — "
Cass smiled.
He laid the flat of his hand on top of my head, very gently, the way a person settles a startled animal.
"Done."
He moved.
He did not move toward Teddy.
He moved toward Bash Sheffield.
Bash had gotten up out of his seat to put himself between Annie and the noise — which was the most like a fiancé he had ever looked, and on the wrong woman — and he never finished standing. Cass closed the distance across the front of the room in three strides. There was a wet sound, like a wishbone snapping in damp meat, and Bash Sheffield was on the floor of Bates Hall holding his right leg with both hands and screaming a noise I'd never heard a Sheffield make.
His shin was bent the wrong way.
It took less than three seconds.
Annie screamed and threw herself across him. "Bash — Bash, oh my God — Bash —"
Margot found her voice and used it. "Someone call the police — somebody call — "
Teddy was past sound. He was pointing at Cass with a finger that wouldn't stay still. "You're done. You — you are done. I will put you under the prison. I will — "
Cass listened to all of it. He took something out of his inside jacket pocket, turned it over once between his fingers, and tossed it underhand onto the head table. It landed next to Teddy's wineglass.
A black USB-C drive.
"Plug that into the AV," Cass said, to no one in particular. "Or don't. Up to you."
Teddy's chief of staff was already there. She was at the head table because that was where her job had her. She picked up the thumb drive with the careful fingers of a person handling a body part. She walked it to the podium laptop, the one running the sponsor reel. She plugged it in.
The Foundation's projection screens — three of them, hung between the murals so the Cabots in the back could see the Cabots in the front — cut over.
The opening slide was an internal Winthrop Holdings audit memo with handwritten notes in Teddy's pen across the bottom. The next slide was a Q3 work paper from his audit firm with a string of cells highlighted that should never have been able to be highlighted. The next slide was a chain of emails with subject lines like re: New Bedford situation and re: positioning ahead of disclosure. The next slide was the suicide note of a man named Patrick Ahearn, who had run a small marine-supplies company out of New Bedford until eight years ago, and who had used the last paragraph of his life to write Theodore Winthrop III's name in his own hand.
The slides kept advancing.
Teddy's face went from white to gray to no color at all. His mouth was working without sound.
Margot, who had been screaming, stopped screaming. She looked at the screen. She looked at her husband. Her knees gave. She sat down hard on the carpet of Bates Hall in cream crepe and pearls and stayed there.
The Cabots in the back understood, all together, that they were not at a charity benefit. They were at the public record of a man being decided about.
Outside, faintly, a siren got louder.
Teddy heard it and seized on it like a thrown rope.
"The police — the police are coming — Locke, you are done, you hear me — "
Boots in the marble entry hall. Boston PD in tactical, six of them, weapons up.
The lieutenant at the front of them came two steps into Bates Hall, saw who was standing under the doorway arch, and his weapon dropped about three inches.
He spoke low into his shoulder mic. He listened. He raised one hand to his men and made them lower their weapons.
He walked over to Cass. He did not put his hand near his own holster.
"Mr. Locke. Didn't expect you tonight."
Cass didn't look at him.
"Family thing."
"Yes, sir," the lieutenant said. He said it the way a Beacon Hill butler says it. "We'll let you finish."
He turned. He took his men out of Bates Hall faster than they had come in.
The hall watched them go.
Teddy understood, finally, what he had walked into.
Whatever Cassius Locke was attached to, in the city outside that hall, was not a thing the Winthrops were going to be able to move.
We left the way we came in.
Behind us: Bash on the floor, Annie on her knees over him, Margot on the carpet, Teddy at the lectern still holding a wineglass he had stopped knowing was in his hand. The string quartet didn't pick back up. Nobody spoke as we walked the length of Bates Hall to the doors.
We took the Red Line back. Cass tilted his head against the train window. The cut at his hairline had opened up under the bandage. He looked, for the first time all night, exactly as tired as he was.
Cinder Way was unchanged. The black cat watched us come up the porch.
He lit the candle out of habit, even though I had paid the gas bill and the kitchen light worked.
I sat him at the card table and got the alcohol and the gauze and pulled the bandage off his head.
"You played it well," I said.
He smiled. The smile was clean of the thing he'd put on it in Bates Hall — the controlled-violent thing. It was just tired.
"You taught me."
I dabbed at the cut. It had been deeper than the butterfly could hold.
"Does it hurt?"
"No."
I knew he was lying.
The truth is, I had known I wasn't a Winthrop since I was fifteen.
I had been on the back stairs of the Beacon Hill house — I'd come down for water at two in the morning — and Margot's voice had stopped me on the third step from the bottom.
Why are you so cold to her? She is our daughter too.
Teddy: She is not. She has never been. She is a stand-in. My real daughter is somewhere out there cold and hungry and you are decorating this one.
I had stood on that step until my feet went numb.
I hadn't cried. I hadn't gone into the kitchen. I had gone back upstairs and I had started a Word document on my laptop, and I had never stopped working on it.
By sixteen I had pulled the hospital file from the Brigham and Women's of the night I was born. I had paid an Andover boy I knew at Choate to spoof me into the records. I had matched the mismatched bracelet timestamps. I had found my real parents the way you find a stranger you don't want to find: Doug and Sherry Pruitt of Lowell, two-bedroom rental, three Atlantic City casino markers, a daughter at home named Annaliese.
I hadn't reached out. I had filed it.
That was also the year I'd met Cass.
He was a kid in a basement in Lawrence. The Foundation had a gala for a missing-children initiative; the Foundation also had a board observer slot for me; I had decided to actually look at where the money went. The lawyer who ran the initiative had given me a paper file. I had walked out of the gala and gone with one of his investigators in a Hyundai Tucson up Route 93 in the rain to a house in a corner of Lawrence the GPS didn't have a name for.
He was seventeen. He had been beaten so badly the EMT had to count his ribs by hand. They thought he wasn't going to wake up. I had used the Winthrop name to call the right state police captain. I had used it to put him at Mass General. I had used it the way I had been raised to use it, except for him instead of for us.
I had used Foundation money — anonymous, untraceable, tagged in the books as a charitable disbursement — to put him through a program for kids the system had given up on. I had paid for him to learn the things he wanted to learn. I had paid for him to take the work he wanted to take. I had not asked what the work was.
I had not expected him to build what he built.
He had said to me, the only real conversation we'd had before tonight, at sixteen in a corridor of Mass General with his ribs taped: I'm going to get strong enough that nobody can do anything to you. And when they try, I'll be there.
I had said okay.
We had not had a blood relation. We had something I trusted more.
I finished the cut on his hairline. I taped it. I pressed my palm to his forehead because I needed to.
"Annie isn't Teddy's daughter."
Cass, who had been letting me work, lifted his eyes.
"Hm?"
"I ran the panels myself. She doesn't share a single Winthrop marker. She matches the Pruitts on every locus."
He waited.
"Doug and Sherry Pruitt are my biological parents," I said, "and Annie is their other daughter. They sold me eighteen years ago. They figured out a few years ago that the Brigham had switched bracelets, decided the settlement the hospital had quietly paid the Winthrops at the time wasn't enough, found a tech at a fertility lab who'd take a bribe, and walked Annie in through the front door."
Cass looked at the candle.
"The Winthrops thought they were correcting an accident," I said. "They were getting walked into a long con by people they would refuse to make eye contact with on Newbury Street."
Cass was quiet for a long time.
Then he laughed. It was a small laugh, but it was the first real one I'd heard from him.
"That's a hell of a play," he said.