(Sean's POV)
I know it's a setup before I've even taken my coat off.
Mother's "chance" seating arrangements have a texture to them, a particular smell, like a room that's been sprayed with air freshener to cover something else. Tonight it's Celeste Marlowe, again, third time this year, seated across from me with a place card that supposedly "just happened" to land there, and my mother two seats down wearing the specific innocent face of a woman who has never once in her life left anything to chance.
I sit. I decide, somewhere between the appetizer and the first real course, that fighting it tonight costs more than just letting it happen.
Celeste, it turns out, makes that decision easy.
She's sharp — genuinely sharp, not the practiced sharpness some of these dinners produce, where a wo
