Not sure how they felt about the Darleys and our former chumminess with one of them, I tried to chart a neutral course. “The relationship is somewhere between is and was.”

Judge Reed paused, sipped. Even the way she drank was elegant. “There’s rumors, you know, Daisy,” she said. “Rumors about Melinda Darley’s Senate seat. The successor she’s handpicked...”

At this I turned my body on my stool to face her directly, bracing. “No, you can’t mean... Blake?” I looked between the Judge and Aunt Jane, waited for them to break, for signs of mischief. Nothing. How? Blake had spent large amounts of time talking about how he never wanted to follow in his mother’s footsteps.

“Money is passed through generations,” said the Judge. “So is power. Are you really so surprised Melinda Darley would want to turn the seat over to her son?”

She was right; it shouldn’t be so surprising, yet here I was, my mind blank with shock, my thoughts scattered off the page. “Oh,” was all I could say.

“Oh is right,” Judge Reed said. “Blake—well, let me tell you a story. So, for a while when they were in high school, Blake had a thing for my Jessica.”

“They dated?” I gathered myself. This was more than Bo had ever let on.

“They did. Went to senior prom together, too. Hers was a different high school than Robert’s. Jessica was dying to transfer, so when she was a sophomore, we let her. She knew people there, but we didn’t.”

“You were doing what was right for her at the time,” Aunt Jane said. “It was different then, wasn’t it, Collette? Between them and us. Between those type of people and us, I mean.”

“I’ll tell you this,” said Judge Reed. “When Jess and Blake started dating, Melinda Darley was pleased as punch that her son had a Black girlfriend. I’m telling you, that woman took a picture with me every chance she got. She threw the whole damn prom dinner in her house! James and I suspected it was so she could control the photography.” She lifted her hands to her face. Click, she mimed. Click, click. “Now, there they were at Melinda Darley’s house, for prom dinner, at one long table, Jess told me later. And her friend, Rebecca, beautiful girl, by the way, I’m still friendly with her mother, she apparently starts putting some butter on her dinner roll. Blake’s best friend—I mean, this guy, right out of the plantation house—Scottie Ellis, his partner in crime, makes a crack about her being Jewish and hogging all the butter.”

“These damn people...” Aunt Jane said.