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The cake left Claire's hands in a slow, easy arc, and that was the detail Mara would keep — not the crash, not the laughter, but the steadiness of her sister-in-law's wrist. Lily sat frozen under a blanket of white frosting, her small hands pressed to her cheeks while tears cut clean lines through the sugar. Two hundred guests turned their faces away with the polite instinct of people who wanted to pretend they had seen nothing. Then a hotel employee crouched beneath the dessert table — and I watched him peel something small and black off the underside, look up, find my eyes, and walk out of the ballroom with his fist closed around it.