Georgia takes a sip of cider. A big group comes in, a bunch of college students from the looks of it, waving their IDs in the air though no one seems to be checking. She gestures toward them. “I was around their age when it all happened. You have to understand, Belle was bigger than the world to me. She was just so cool. She would take me out of school to go to fashion shows, cool off-Broadway performances. She gave me my first glass of champagne when I was sixteen at the Bemelmans Bar in the Carlyle. I met so many interesting people through her, and I didn’t even realize it until much later. Geoffrey Beene, Horst, the photographer, Albert Hadley, the interior designer. I mean, I was awestruck by how well-dressed and sophisticated everyone was, but I didn’t realize the magnitude of what she exposed me to until I was a lot older.” She pops an olive in her mouth, chews it slowly, forming her next words.

“I guess what I’m trying to say is that I never would have done what she accused me of. Never. And it broke me that she would think that of me.” Her eyes moisten and shift again, and she crumples a napkin in her lap, tearing it into pieces like she’s a nervous young girl, about to be admonished by her idol.

“I wrote her so many letters. I even apologized in some of them, thinking that would assuage her. That if I said I was sorry, even for something I didn’t do, she’d take me back. But none of them were sent. My own mother was so angry, and somehow that fury overwhelmed me even more. I didn’t know who to believe. What to believe. I even began thinking I had taken the stupid bracelet. I convinced myself of it. I trashed my own room one night, looking for it.”

She lets the scraps of the torn-up napkin flutter onto the metal table. “And then one day, I got a call from my mom. It was before cell phones, obviously, so my roommate and I had to share a landline. She said Belle had died and then reminded me to eat the oranges she had sent me before they went bad. I was numb, silent for an hour, and then I screamed.” Tears begin to slide down her cheeks, rivulets on her somewhat weathered skin, and she wipes at them quickly.