Chương 6
Elaine looked toward Graham for support and found none.
Robert said, “I should have stopped her.”
Tori faced him. “Did you know she destroyed it?”
“Not at first.”
“When did you know?”
“A few weeks later.”
“And you said nothing.”
He took off his glasses and rubbed the bridge of his nose. It was a familiar movement. He had done it during arguments throughout Tori’s childhood, usually just before agreeing with whoever seemed least likely to stop being angry.
“I thought the damage was done.”
“That was convenient.”
“Yes.”
The admission was so immediate that it disrupted her anger.
Robert put his glasses back on.
“I have been a coward in very ordinary ways,” he said. “That makes them easy to excuse. It does not make them small.”
Elaine stared at him as if betrayal were a language only she was allowed to speak.
Graham looked at Rebecca. “Do you want to leave?”
Rebecca’s eyes remained on Tori.
“I want the whole letter.”
“I don’t have it,” Tori said.
“Write it again.”
“I can’t.”
“Try.”
Tori looked at the coin in Rebecca’s hand.
“Not today.”
Rebecca’s voice broke. “You keep deciding when I get to know my own son.”
The words landed cleanly.
Tori nodded.
“You’re right.”
She removed the white gloves completely and tucked them beneath her belt. Her hands looked bare and ordinary without them.
“I’ll come tomorrow,” she said. “I’ll tell you everything I remember. You can ask whatever you want. I won’t leave because it gets uncomfortable.”
Rebecca studied her face.
“Ten in the morning.”
“I’ll be there.”
Graham said, “At my house.”
Rebecca shook her head. “Mine.”
Her father looked at her.
“For once,” she said, “not at your house.”
Graham accepted the correction.
Wes remained beneath the floral arch, alone now. The guests had begun drifting toward the exits despite the announcement that dinner would be served. A few relatives approached him and then changed direction when they saw his face. The wedding cake stood untouched beneath its arrangement of white roses.
Tori started toward the nearest exit.
Wes called after her.
“Tori.”
She kept walking.
He caught up near the coat-check room. “You can’t just leave.”
She stopped.
Behind him, Elaine watched from across the ballroom. Robert stood beside her but no longer touched her.
“What do you need?” Tori asked.
Wes flinched at the formality.
“I need you to tell Claire I’m not some monster.”
“I don’t think you’re a monster.”
Relief appeared too quickly.
“I think you’re a man who tells lies and waits for women to make them harmless.”
His face reddened. “You don’t know anything about my relationship.”
“I know the part that involved me.”
“I was trying to explain why you never came around.”
“You could have said I didn’t come around because Mom searched my apartment while I was in physical therapy and took the letters I wrote to a dead Marine’s family.”
“I didn’t know that.”
“You knew she told people I’d been discharged.”
“I thought it might be true.”
“You never asked.”
“You never answered my calls.”
“You called when you needed money.”
“That is not fair.”
Tori looked at him.
He glanced toward the ballroom.
Four years earlier, Wes had called from a parking lot outside a casino in Baltimore and told her his banking app was frozen. He had sworn it was a technical problem. She sent him eight thousand dollars because he sounded frightened. Two months later, Elaine told relatives Tori had refused to contribute to their parents’ anniversary trip.
Wes had repaid twelve hundred dollars and stopped mentioning the rest.
“No,” Tori said. “It isn’t.”
His expression shifted. He knew what she meant.
He lowered his voice. “I was going to pay you back.”
“This isn’t about the money.”
“Everything with you becomes evidence.”
“Only because you keep pleading confusion.”
He rubbed both hands over his face. “Claire won’t speak to me.”
“She made a good decision.”
“She canceled our wedding.”
“She postponed making you her husband. Those aren’t the same thing.”
“You always do that.”
“Do what?”
“Make everything sound like an order.”
Tori looked at the ballroom doors.
“I learned to speak clearly because people can die when you don’t.”
“And the rest of us just disappoint you.”
The bitterness in his voice was real. Beneath it lived something younger, something she recognized from childhood: the boy who knocked over a lamp and looked toward his sister before the glass had finished breaking.
“You disappoint yourself,” she said. “Then you get angry when someone notices.”
Wes stepped back as if she had struck him.
She regretted the sentence before the silence ended. It was too clean, too prepared by years of resentment. It sounded like something a person said when she wanted to win rather than tell the truth.
Tori exhaled.
“That was cruel.”
He looked at her, surprised.
“It was also partly true,” she said. “But I said it to hurt you.”
Wes swallowed.
The wedding coordinator passed them carrying a clipboard against her chest. She pretended not to hear.
“What am I supposed to do?” he asked.
“Tell Claire the truth before you explain why you lied.”
“What truth?”
“All of it.”
His eyes moved away.
Tori nodded. “That’s the problem.”
She left through the front entrance.
Outside, late-afternoon sunlight reflected off a line of black cars and made the white stone steps painful to look at. Guests stood in small groups near the valet station, speaking with the false privacy people adopted when they hoped to be overheard. A woman Tori did not recognize held a phone at chest level, its camera pointed in her direction.
Tori stopped.
The woman lowered it.
“Delete that,” Tori said.
“I wasn’t filming you.”
“You were.”
The woman looked around for support. No one offered any.
She tapped her screen. “Fine.”
“From recently deleted too.”
“This is a public place.”
“It’s private property.”
The woman’s face tightened, but she opened the folder and deleted the video.
May you like
Tori thanked her.
The woman seemed disappointed by that.
