Mommy

He didn't call her name. He didn't call her by any of the careful words they'd rehearsed for the rare, stolen hours they'd spent together — Miss Yolanda, or the code word his father had taught him, Vanilla Lady, for when other people were listening.

He simply ran.

Small polished shoes slapping against marble, weaving between waiters and gowns and a startled string quartet, Beckett crossed the ballroom floor in the time it took Yolanda to set down the tray she was holding — though later she wouldn't remember doing that at all.

"Mommy!"

The word landed in the room like a dropped glass. It carried over the chamber music, over two hundred conversations about donations and tax write-offs, and every one of them stopped.

He hit her at full speed, arms locking around her waist, face burrowing into the apron she wore over her uniform. "Mommy, you're here, you're here—"

Yolanda's arms came around him before her mind caught up with her body. Six years of careful distance undone in four seconds. She felt him shaking, or maybe that was her.

Somewhere behind him, she heard the sound of a champagne flute meeting the floor.

She looked up and found Corwin Hale frozen mid-stride, one hand still extended toward the space where his son had been standing, his face gone the color of the tablecloths. Beside him, Anneliese Hale had not moved at all. She stood in her ice-blue silk with her hand still raised — she'd been about to smooth Beckett's collar — and her eyes moved from her husband, to the waitress on the ballroom floor, to the boy pressed against a stranger's apron calling her by the one name that belonged, as far as Anneliese Hale had believed for six years, only to her.

The silence stretched. Two hundred guests, and not one of them breathed.

Then, from somewhere near the bar, a phone lifted into the air, screen glowing, already recording.