Sham

A Gilded-Age Icarus in silk slippers, Katherine Van Riper pirouettes across Manhattan’s marble lobbies while her father auctions ancestral moonlight in the form of saltwater pearls; when the last chandelier bulb pops she is marooned amid florist bills, monogrammed gloves, and a single garnet pin. Her aunts—two sphinxes upholstered in sables—offer rescue contingent on matrimony with the oleaginous Monte Buck, heir to a gusher that bleeds black gold into every ballroom. Love, however, has already whispered its name through the lips of Tom Jaffrey, a lawyer whose pockets jingle only with ideals. In a midnight reckoning Katherine unwraps the velvet box meant to save her and confronts paste for priceless orbs: her patrimony was swapped for roulette chips long ago. Honor, like a cracked Sevres vase, is glued back together by an auntian check—inked faster than a gossip columnist can blink—yet the price remains her betrothal to Tom, now a transaction sanctified by silence rather than splendor.