She shook her head.
“Jason Mitchell and Evelyn Mitchell.”
Jason’s mother.
For a moment, the courthouse, the reporters, the traffic, all faded behind the memory of Evelyn’s perfume.
White gardenia and powder.
Evelyn Mitchell had never raised her voice. She did not need to. She had ruled rooms with the quiet certainty of a woman who considered emotion a flaw in other people. She had smiled through charity luncheons, praised me in public as “our brilliant Iris,” and later, when no one else could hear, reminded me that brilliance was unattractive when it made a husband feel small.
The last time I saw her, she had stood at the foot of my hospital bed wearing pearls and a cream-colored coat.
“Families survive difficult moments,” she had said, looking not at my bruised face but at the monitors beside me. “But only if wives learn discretion.”
