Chapter 11

Then the nine-year-old girl at the orphan table started clapping—one child clapping alone in a silent room. Then another orphan joined, then a third, then a woman in the front row stood up. Then the man next to her, then the entire second row.The applause spread through the room like a wave: not the polite, automatic applause of a charity event, but the kind that comes from the gut, the kind that hurts your hands, the kind that happens when two hundred people see something they will never be able to explain to anyone who wasn't there.A standing ovation. Every person in the room—every person except one. Cornelius Braddock stood alone on his plywood stage, microphone dead in his hand, watching an orphanage dining hall give a standing ovation to the girl he had just humiliated.The dining hall door opened; nobody heard it over the applause. Bernice Fontaine stepped inside and stopped. She wore a black crewneck sweater, dark slacks, and flat-soled leather shoes—the same clothes she wore every Saturday when she came to pick up Daphne for their weekly rehearsal at the Harlem Community Arts Center. A small gold brooch shaped like a musical note was pinned to her chest, a keepsake from the night she won at Blackpool.She had no idea there was a charity event tonight. She had come at the same time she always came, every Saturday for twelve years, because that was the arrangement she had made with the orphanage director the year Josephine Wallace died.She saw Daphne standing in the center of the room. She saw the silver shoes on Daphne's feet—Josephine's shoes, the ones Bernice herself had watched Josephine break in thirty years ago at a studio in Harlem. She saw two hundred people on their feet clapping. She saw a man standing alone on a makeshift stage, face the color of old plaster, a microphone hanging dead at his side.Something was wrong.Bernice moved through the crowd. People parted for her without knowing why—something about the way she walked, the absolute economy of every step. She reached Daphne and put her hand on the girl's shoulder, gently."What happened?"Daphne looked at her teacher. The calm she had held through the entire performance cracked, just barely, just at the edges. Her lower lip pressed tight against her teeth; her eyes shone.

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