Chapter 16
"I told myself the hotel could afford it."
I thought of the staff whose overtime Marjorie had worried about. I thought of the aging equipment falsely described as replaced.
Then I thought of my mother's photograph disappearing from the screen.
"Why did you wait until that picture was showing?" I asked.
Avery's face tightened.
"I knew you would be emotional."
That answer took something out of me that the rest had not.
She had understood my grief because I had trusted her with it. Then she had scheduled my humiliation around it.
"You stood beside me while I chose my wedding dress," I said. "All that time, you were planning how to make me take it off."
She began crying.
"I miss you."
I folded my hands so I would not reach for hers out of habit.
"I miss the person I thought was sitting beside me."
She asked whether there could ever be another chance. I told her I wasn't going to build my recovery around a promise to restore our friendship.
Her child deserved safety. Her cooperation with the investigation mattered, but neither fact gave her a place in my home.
When she left, Joan stayed until I could breathe normally again.
Six weeks after the ruined dinner, the independent report was completed. The identified Northline payments had no substantiated services behind them, and the matter moved forward through the appropriate legal channels.
There were demands, negotiations, and long intervals when nothing appeared to happen. Reed and I learned to stop treating every envelope as a verdict on our future.
One evening, he told me I could leave without explaining myself to his mother or anybody else.
"You don't owe me a wedding because I didn't betray you," he said.
I looked at the man who had sat across from me in the clinic before asking for anything.
"And you don't owe me a child to be worth marrying."
His eyes filled, but he did not look away.
Three months after the dinner, I called Wendy.
"Do you have a Saturday available in September?"
PART 8 — THE WEDDING WE CHOSE
We invited thirty-two people to the second wedding.
The ceremony took place in the hotel's garden, where the lake appeared between the trees and the kitchen staff could hear the music through the open service windows.
Wendy worked with the vendors who could transfer deposits. We chose simpler flowers, fewer tables, and a dinner we could enjoy without wondering whether everybody was watching us enjoy it correctly.