A Decade For Nothing novel · Chapter 17 of 24

Chapter 17: Thirty Years of Oakes

Levi's POV

The lakefront ballroom held three hundred people in evening clothes, all of them standing under one huge chandelier with glasses in their hands.

I stood at the check-in table in my navy coat, with Nan on one arm and Joel at the other.

The woman at the list ran her pen down a page.

"Harrow," she said. "Party of three. Table forty-one."

"Who put us on?" I asked.

"It came in from the family's office yesterday."

Joel leaned in to me.

"Macy did that," he said. "If it's a trap, at least there's shrimp."

"It's a trap with shrimp," Nan said. "Let's go."

Outside, at the far end of the curb, a tired man in a polo sat in a white van with a clipboard.

It was the same lab tech Joel had hired for the lawn.

He raised his coffee cup to us.

Joel had paid him twice for the same job, and he looked fine with it.

Table forty-one stood against the back wall, beside the door the waiters used.

Nan took the chair with the best view and set her purse in her lap.

"I've waited ten years for this," she said. "I want to see his face when it falls."

The ballroom filled.

I knew the faces by now.

Two hundred of them had seen the clip, and I watched them see me, one table after another.

Some looked away.

A man in a green tie lifted his glass an inch in my direction and drank, and I could not tell if it was sympathy or mockery.

The front row was a line of gold chairs, set apart from the tables.

Gordon sat in the middle of it in a black tuxedo with his glasses on their chain.

Macy sat on his right, in a blue dress that cut across the curve of her stomach.

Her hands were folded in her lap, and she stared at the stage.

To his left was an empty chair.

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