Natalie scrambled to her feet, her face burning with humiliation as muffled laughter spread across the banquet hall.The scrambling had its own particular quality — the urgent, graceless movement of someone trying to compress the duration of their exposure by getting vertical as quickly as possible, the specific, desperate efficiency of someone whose primary objective was no longer anything that had mattered to her thirty seconds ago but simply to not be on the floor anymore.She was on her feet.She straightened her dress with the automatic, slightly shaking quality of someone performing a gesture because it was the gesture available rather than because it accomplished anything meaningful. She lifted her chin. She produced the cold, composed expression she had been putting on for decades in situations that required it.The expression was working less well than usual.She looked around.The muffled laughter was the specific, socially managed variety — people who were not going to open