Diane was still talking. She raised her wine glass. “Try to see the positive. Now you actually look presentable.” Jessica glanced down at my wet shoes and said something to one of the cousins beside her, just loud enough. “Somebody bring her an old towel.

We don’t want that smell on the expensive linen.” Brendan didn’t correct either of them. He was refilling his glass.

I put my phone back in my bag. I asked the woman next to me to please pass the bread. She did, looking uncertain. And I sat there, soaking wet and seven months pregnant, and I ate dinner.

The calls started nine days later. Not to me directly. To my office line, through normal channels, the way they would for anyone. Brendan’s firm had been notified that their management contract was under review pending an audit. Diane’s hospitality board had received notice that Calloway was exercising a buyout clause and restructuring the board composition. His sister’s department was being consolidated. HR had been in contact.

Brendan figured it out on day eleven. He called me, not to apologize, not at first. “Is this you? Is Calloway Group you?” He sounded like he was asking a question he already knew the answer to and was just furious he hadn’t known sooner. I told him yes. He said some things I won’t write down here. Then he said, “You could have told me.” And I said, “Brendan, your mother poured dirty water on me while I was pregnant with your child, and you laughed.” He didn’t say anything for a while after that.

Diane called three days later. I let it go to voicemail. Her message was long and it started with the word “obviously” which told me everything about how sorry she actually was. I haven’t called her back.

I had my daughter eleven weeks after that dinner. Her name is Clara. She has absolutely no idea any of this happened and I plan to keep it that way for as long as I possibly can.

I still think about the rug sometimes. How I stood in a showroom and pointed at it and said yes, that one, and some contractor wrote it down and ordered it, and three years later I was sitting on it, wet and shaking, while the woman who had it installed laughed at me. I approved that rug. I didn’t know it then, and she doesn’t know it now, and honestly I’m not even sure why that detail bothers me more than the rest of it.

Actually, I think I do know. It’s because none of them ever saw me at all.

They still don’t.