Chapter 6

It was Lily, six years old, the youngest girl at St. Cecilia's. She was holding the door frame with one hand and a stuffed rabbit with the other."You going somewhere fancy?""Yes, Lily.""You scared?"Harper thought about lying, decided not to. "Yes."Lily considered this carefully. "You going to come back, right?""I'm going to come back.""Promise?""Promise."Downstairs, Sister Margaret called her name one last time. The van to Manhattan was waiting. Harper stood up. She slipped the metronome into the inside pocket of her coat. She didn't know why; she just knew she could not leave it behind.The van pulled up to the Plaza Hotel at 6:45 in the evening.Charles Hartwell III was already inside. He had arrived twenty minutes earlier through the side entrance, because Charles Hartwell did not stand in lines and did not enter rooms through the same doors as everyone else.He was fifty-eight years old, 6'2", silver at the temples, dark at the back, in a tuxedo cut by a tailor in London who had measured him for the first time when he was twenty-three and had measured him every year since. He did not shake hands; he extended two fingers. He had been doing it since Yale, and Yale was where he had learned that a handshake was a small surrender of power and two fingers was not.The Hartwell Foundation Gala was in its forty-first year. His grandfather had started it; his father had grown it; he had inherited it the way he had inherited everything: without ever asking for it, and without ever being told he might not deserve it.A waiter approached with a tray of champagne. Hartwell did not look at him; he took a glass."Thank you, sir," the waiter said.

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